Robots are capable of all sorts of tasks to help better treat cancer: They connect oncologists to patients remotely, make incisions, staple them shut, deliver “nano” therapies—and they clean rooms. Newly published research from Penn Medicine infection control specialists found that ultraviolet (UV) robots helped reduce the rates of transmission of the common bacterial infection known as Clostridium difficile (C. diff) among cancer inpatients – mostly blood cancer patients, a group more vulnerable to hospital-acquired infections –  by 25 percent. The no-touch device, used after patients withC. diff or contact precautions were discharged from the hospital, also resulted in substantial health care savings, estimated between $350,000 and $1.5 million annually. 

The data, initially presented at the 2015 ID Week meeting in San Diego by David Pegues, MD, a professor of Infectious Diseases in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine and a healthcare epidemiologist in the Hospital of University of Pennsylvania’s Infection Prevention and Control, was published today in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America.

Several new cleaning tactics—on top of all the scrubbing, mopping, spraying, and wiping performed by Environmental Services (EVS) professionals—have been implemented at hospitals across the U.S to help reduce transmission of such infections, but which new methods are the most effective  and practical has remained unclear. 

UV robots flash UV lights across the room to lock onto DNA of organisms and kill them.

“There weren’t a lot of studies showing the efficacy of UV lights to clean hospital rooms,” said Pegues, who co-authored a recent study that found a lack of evidence for best methods for cleaning hospital rooms. “These results help fill that gap.  This is a cost-saving measure that showed a sizeable reduction in infections for a high-risk group of patients—and set the stage for further implementation of the technology at our hospitals.”

The team found that using a ultraviolet germicidal irradiation robot after a room cleaning by EVS not only reduced the number of infections in cancer patients compared to the year prior with no robot, but did so without adversely impacting room turn around time. They also report that  infections increased by 16 percent on units without the robot during the study period. 

C. diff forms spores that are resistant to many disinfectants and can persist in the hospital environment for months.  Approximately 500,000 people contract C. diff while in the hospital every year in the U.S., and nearly 15,000 die directly from the infection. Cancer patients, whose immune systems may be compromised from stem cell transplants and/or chemotherapy, are more susceptible to infections than other inpatients.