About
Dr. Kelly has been involved in infectious disease practice, teaching, and research for the past 30 years. He has been with the Prisma Health-Upstate since 1994. From the beginning, he has been involved with collaborative projects involving Clemson. Shortly after his arrival, he participated in a Clemson-Prisma Health seed grant project for the development of polymer based antibiotic delivery devices. This seed grant resulted in an NIH funded project. As part of this project, he served on the dissertation committee for a Clemson doctoral student. Another seed grant project looked at the clinical utility of PFGE in infectious disease practice. More recently, he collaborated with the engineering faculty on two grant applications related to air flow in operating areas. In recent years, the focus of his research has concerned assessing and improving hand hygiene performance. He and his colleagues have developed validated benchmarks for hand hygiene opportunities in various hospital settings. These were used to develop an automated electronic hand hygiene monitoring system. Most recently, they are attempting to use compliance data to design behavioral interventions to drive performance improvement. Dr. Kelly is also an adjunct professor of biomedical sciences, clinical internal medicine and infectious diseases at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, Greenville.
How their research is transforming health care
Dr. Kelly’s research is attempting to make healthcare safer and more efficient. Hand hygiene is probably the single most effective infection prevention measure with the greatest return on investment. Accurate measurement of hand hygiene activities allows assessment of gaps in performance. He and colleagues can analyze the performance gaps to identify opportunities for improvement. They are attempting to use these data to focus on barriers and beliefs that hinder adherence. They also want to improving environments and work flows to make adherence easier and more natural. In this way, they use process improvement to make things better for both patients and healthcare workers.
Health research keywords
Prisma, Hand hygiene, performance improvement, infection prevention, device evaluation, behavior modification, system modeling
