According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Healthcare-associated infections account for hundreds of millions of patients affected annually worldwide. WHO’s recommendations to combat this threat include infection prevention measures, including appropriate hand hygiene, staff accountability, and behavioral change. These prior methods are at the root of what the Sani Nudge technology accomplishes in a healthcare setting.
Sani Nudge was founded in Denmark and supported by People Ventures, a family-owned Venture Capital with roots in telecommunication and an investment portfolio in several healthcare technology companies. Sani Nudge experienced appreciable interest in their solution due to global attention to hand hygiene improvement brought on by Covid-19, as well as the looming threat of antimicrobial resistance and healthcare-associated infections.
2021 marked a year of opportunity and advancements for Sani Nudge and the company’s global expansion efforts. In 2021, having partnered with Ecolab Europe, the global leader in water, hygiene, infection prevention solutions, and services, the rollout of over a dozen countries has been vast and continues to be successful. Sani Nudge is set on further growth through expansion into new markets and releasing additional solutions.
With partnership interests from Australia, Russia, the US, Japan, and the Middle East, Sani Nudge is preparing to unveil its technology to more healthcare organizations that need hand hygiene improvement.
Sani Nudge is proud to announce that 2021 was a year of achievements, progress, and growth. The organization leans into 2022 for a year that will see further global expansion, product development and distribution, and clinical expertise. This is a year in review analysis of Sani Nudge by Business Unit in 2021.
Clinical & Research achievements in 2021
Leading digital healthcare technology that improves patient outcomes
The Sani Nudge Clinical & Research department focuses on generating scientific output that documents the validity, reliability, and effectiveness of Sani Nudge. The department also plays a key role in creating and maintaining a network of global Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) that input Sani Nudge’s research and conduct collaborative studies with the organization.
Research
2021 was a highly successful year for the company’s Clinical & Research department. Together with researchers and customers from healthcare organizations across Europe, the team published six peer-reviewed research articles in leading scientific journals within infection prevention.
- Reduction in hospital-acquired infections
- Hand hygiene levels of healthcare workers before and during the COVID-19 pandemic
- Validating the Sani Nudge hand hygiene solution
- Significantly improved hand hygiene levels using the Sani Nudge system
- Identifying high-risk areas of infections and contamination in hospitals and nursing homes
- Using the Sani Nudge system to access different interventions
Sani Nudge’s Senior Medical Director attended the European Conference in Infection Prevention, ICPIC, in Geneva and presented two research posters which were subsequently published in the scientific journal Antimicrobial Resistance and Infection Control:
- Reduction in staff absenteeism (short term sick leave)
- Using Sani Nudge to assess the effect of hand hygiene interventions
The published studies demonstrate the effectiveness of Sani Nudge to double healthcare hand hygiene levels, reduce hospital-acquired infections and short-term sick leave of healthcare workers. A prominent customer of Sani Nudge was awarded the Danish Hygiene Award 2021 for the hand hygiene improvement work in their hospital with the Sani Nudge system, which significantly reduced hospital-acquired bloodstream infections.
Furthermore, the first study investigating the feasibility of Sani Nudge to identify high-risk disease transmission areas and automated contact tracing was published in PLOS ONE.
The activities of 2021 have provided scientific documentation to the effectiveness of our solution that is superior to other hand hygiene systems. The results have secured Sani Nudge a leading position as an evidence-based solution developed and trusted by healthcare organizations around Europe. The scientific activities have helped the company drive sales activities and close deals, including the contract with Ecolab.
Key Opinion Leaders
The Clinical & Research department works closely with Sani Nudge’s clinical advisory board to ensure continuous scientific input to our work. In 2021, a new member joined the respected team; Jannik Hilsted, the previous CEO of Copenhagen University Hospital and former Chief Medical Officer of the Novo Nordisk Foundation. The clinical advisory board has put hand hygiene, infection prevention, quality of care, and patient safety higher up on the clinical and political agenda. They have provided essential insights into healthcare organizations’ decision-making processes and helped set our research strategy.
Medical podcast
The Sani Nudge Clinical and Research team has successfully launched a medical podcast where global healthcare experts share their knowledge and expertise. So far, 23 medical experts have participated and include KOLs, such as the President of the French Hygiene Society, the Director-General for Disease Surveillance and Control at the Ministry of Health of Oman, and the Chief Editor of the American Journal Infection Control. With listeners from more than 50 countries, the podcast has generated interest and established us as a leading digital infection prevention company. Additionally, the podcast has expanded our network and generated new leads.
A new year means new opportunities.
In 2022, the Sani Nudge Clinical and Research team will expand and scale up the scope of work to ensure that Sani Nudge remains a leading digital healthcare technology that improves patient outcomes and contributes to sustainable healthcare systems. The research will generate new real-world evidence and improvement data from long-term care facilities, additional validation studies, qualitative data from healthcare workers’ experiences using the solution, and patient outcome studies.
Details provided by Dr. Marco Bo Hansen
Research and development achievements in 2021
A new year supports user focus.
Project prioritization and project execution in focus for 2021
Kicking off 2021, the Sani Nudge Research and Development team was prepared to implement their roadmap strategy and accommodate a revolving door of user-based project requests. Project prioritization, ongoing updates, and an established need the transparency company-wide about project planning were the goals to set the tone for the year.
Release communication ensures quality deliverables.
The year was primarily spent improving release communication internally and externally. The team also streamlined the development process by implementing the Scrum mindset (control over the empirical approach, self-organization, collaboration, value-based prioritization, time-boxing, and iterative development). Using this approach ensured that the team made higher quality deliveries while improving the developer’s estimating skill.
Accomplishments include the introduction of a new product roadmap, an internal and external communication process, a well-defined process and guidelines for using project management tools, and all projects were categorized into one of three different stages of maturity; Discovery projects, Pending projects, and Approved projects.
These advancements enabled the R&D team to release support for six new languages to Sani Analytics, take on three new partner-funded projects, and begin a makeover of the Sani Backoffice App to be more intuitive and user-friendly. At the same time, the department was adding the support for a new LoRaWAN network provider TTI (The Things Industry).
The R&D team subsequently released the Sani Backoffice App, which included updated Sani Help articles, new product launch documentation for marketing and partners. All features have been later migrated to Sani Backoffice 2.
From a device mechanical project perspective, much work was put into regression testing the new firmware for the new Sani Sensor 2, enabling us to present this product to market in 2022 Q1. In parallel, the R&D department made several prototypes of the next generation of the bottle pump holder and the bottle pump sensor, which are both significant achievements and milestones reached.
In the final month of Q4, a significant milestone for the R&D team was implementing the new LoRaWAN provider (TTI), which has paved the way for a rollout to all Danish sites within Q1 2022. TTI offers a strong community and improved integration support, which provides Sani Nudge with great potential to build new features and products, providing even more value to our partners and end-users.
A new year supports user focus.
In 2022, the R&D team will focus even more on existing customers and end-users by making applications even more user-friendly and improving on the self-service Sani help articles freeing up the support needed from the partners.
The R&D team will empower the partners to efficiently operate and maintain the crucial system parts of the Sani Nudge system. This will be partly in releasing new monitoring features and improving how Sani Backoffice is used to assert Sani sensors.
The team will also start new bachelor projects with students from the Techincal University of Denmark (DTU) focusing on machine learning utilizing our vast amount of captured data from the IoT sensors, understanding if new insights or features could be made possible, and continuing the great collaboration we have with the engineering schools. This is at the core of Sani Nudge’s foundation having been rooted from DTU with our founders CEO Theis Jensen and CTO Morten T. Egholm having studied there and conceptualized the hand hygiene solution.
2022 will, without a doubt, be necessary for Sani Nudge as a stepping stone into being a world leader in utilizing LoRaWAN and IoT devices to make data-driven decisions and monitoring within a clinical setup to make our vision a reality.
“To automatically measure and analyze the hand-hygiene compliance, for better patient safety.”
Focus and Value 2021
- Increasing quality assurance for products and applications
- Streamlining internal development and release processes
- Running projects more structured and defining transparent processes.
Achievements
- Implementation of Scrum in software development
- Periodic bi-weekly software releases
- Release communication externally and internally
- Structured project management
- High-level one-year product roadmap
- Quarterly roadmap and project status
- Increased accuracy in development estimates
- Multiple iterations of Product Roadmap layout and project “cue cards.”
How end-users benefited
- More stable and intuitive user applications
- More information available for self-service
How partners benefited
- Release management and communication to a higher level
- New Sani sensor with aesthetic, mechanical changes, and improved firmware
- Updated user actions to solve open tickets in Sani backoffice
- Easier to install Sani sensors with new Sani backoffice App
Details provided by Martin Thorsen
Sales achievements in 2021
45,000 patients protected from harm in a year that saw Sales growth and progress
The Sani Nudge sales team, which includes Customer Success and Marketing functions, focused on sales partners, customers, and user satisfaction as priorities for 2021. The team’s attention-supported partnerships concentrated on business growth and social impact. The sales team helped partners understand how the Sani Nudge hand hygiene solution works through product training, generating documentation, and providing online support. Additionally, the team regularly speaks with all sales teams to develop more significant opportunities. This department plays a crucial role in ensuring product feedback that translates into product improvements, benefiting end-user staff and patients.
Welcoming new partners
2021 started with welcoming a sizeable new member to the Sani Nudge family. After months of planning, the Sani Nudge sales team revealed an extensive partnership with ECOLAB Europe. ECOLAB would be the exclusive sales partner for markets the UK, France, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Romania, Poland, The Netherlands, Belgium, and Slovenia. At the same time, Sani Nudge entered into an exclusive partnership with Just Nudge, a partner that would take over the support of the danish customers. After several successful months, ECOLAB also requested to take over the sales responsibility in Germany, effective during the summer.
Sales partner training
The partnership with ECOLAB has provided Sani Nudge the opportunity to welcome ECOLAB Europe’s healthcare salesforce of more than 200 persons to our newly developed sales partner training program called Sani Academy. The learning site’s five courses provided partners with an understanding of how the Sani Nudge system can empower them to help their customers prevent hospital-acquired infections and decrease the number of sick days for staff. Further, partners learn how to install the system in an operational ward in a few hours and ensure it stays operational through dedicated visits that fit into their regular customer visits. Additionally, the Sani Nudge team effectively and safely traveled to regional sites to provide partners with in-person training and assist on the first installations. Sani Nudge was able to fully onboard all partnership teams.
An upgrade of support
To ensure outstanding support of the sales representatives speaking 11+ languages, Sani Nudge launched an online service desk at help.saninudge.com with dedicated customer success managers ready to help answer any questions as they arise. Since the software was released, they have helped solve more than 700 support requests.
Social impact
2021 has been both a blessing and a curse. The focus on preventing the spread of infections has never been so present for healthcare managers and staff as it is now. Governments, politicians, and experts all over the world are for the first time putting their money where their mouths are and making sure society will once and for all prioritize washing hands to protect vulnerable people. But since Covid is primarily spreading outside of hospitals and the burden on healthcare staff has made staff absenteeism the biggest threat to our healthcare system, the focus on hand hygiene compliance was never rooted in the healthcare settings. Unconditionally high admission rates also made it impossible for our partners to install the systems creating a back lock.
Despite these challenges, Sani Nudge has been able to help ensure that over 5,000 healthcare workers have sanitized their hands more than 30 million times while protecting 45,000 patients from being harmed and avoiding 375,000 hours of staff sick leave. The measured preventive combined to an incredible amount of €44 million in potential savings!
Sani Nudge would not have reached such high impact numbers had the team not grown the overall installation base three times and increased our year-to-date realized revenue growth rate by 42%.
A new year means new opportunities.
In 2022, Sani Nudge will expand the team and scale up the activities mentioned above to ensure that Sani Nudge keeps the position as a leading digital healthcare technology that improves patient outcomes and contributes to sustainable healthcare systems. Sani Nudge will quadruple installations in 2022, increasing revenue by 500%. Additionally, new partnerships, unique solutions, and improving the efficiency of the sales process will allow more healthcare institutions to buy and use the Sani Nudge hand hygiene solution, protecting healthcare workers and their patients from harm.
Details provided by Theis Jensen
Operations achievements in 2021
Supplier Quality Saves Money
The Operations team of Sani Nudge is responsible for the smooth and profitable production of products and operation of the Sani Nudge system. So put to the point, if Operations is running tightly, your company will deliver what it needs to produce when it needs to create it — at the price it requires.
Furthermore, Operations ensure a smooth system operation and measure all internal and external system components. External customer-facing components could be the availability of sensors, system health for gateways, while internal components are all production tools and internal IT.
At Sani Nudge, Operations is also responsible for order management and shipping and return control for faulty products.
In 2021 Operations went through a complete rebuild for many processes. Operations transitioned from a highly technical team to a centralized place for orders and procedures. In this transition, the Operations team streamlined a vast majority of how to do things better to accommodate the increasing quality requirements from our customers.
During the year, the most significant milestones for Operations were;
- Improved system monitoring for better stability across the entire Sani Nudge ecosystem
- Improved order processing, timing, and communication for orders
- New hirings and internal training to match the growth seen
- Resource allocation for better inventory management, valuation, and forecasting
- Procurement of raw materials for upcoming production series of hardware in a wildly fluctuating supply chain landscape
- Improved service level management with vendors and sales partners
With the above milestones in mind, Operations are now better geared towards supporting the growth for Sani Nudge and taking on new customers and new markets.
For 2022, plenty of new priorities awaits. Some of the bigger and defining ones include sourcing stability and calculation of outsourcing opportunities.
Increased Business Volume
When you start purchasing your supplies through centralized procurement experts, you can order larger quantities of products, which often equals better negotiations with suppliers. Ordering in large batches decreases the purchasing costs for Sani Nudge because we issue fewer orders and payments and process fewer incoming shipments. Our trusted suppliers have lower prices for the same reasons, and this benefits our customers by creating a more resilient Sani Nudge system.
Consistent Supplies
A centralized procurement process will also ensure that Sani Nudge always receives the same parts and material in the same quality. For example, when orders exist across several different production companies, there might be inconsistencies in their production methods and material, leading to increased complexity and a higher manual labor cost for quality inspections. Choosing the right supplier reduces this risk and enables us to pass products to customers who trust the quality. The known characteristics of Sani Nudge supplies allow the company’s internal teams to reduce errors and unexpected problems easier.
Close Relationships Solve Problems
The Sani Nudge Operations team can develop close relationships with the key suppliers. Moving closer to the most critical vendors builds personal relationships, which is – even in 2022 – often a metric to solve things. Interpersonal relationships can help smooth disagreements, quicker solve incidents, and reduce the risk of a given supplier. Just a few incidents can pose a hiccup for Sani Nudge, and focusing on this will allow the Operations team to cease things beforehand.
Supplier Quality Saves Money
A stronger procurement focus also builds up the expertise within Sani Nudge to look for top value in addition to competitive pricing. Quality components are essential for Sani Nudge’s services, and overlooking the quality is an equally important metric to pricing over an extended period. The Sani Nudge procurement staff has the experience to evaluate suppliers based on the value they deliver to Sani Nudge. For example, the procurement department may pay slightly more for orders from a supplier with a good track record for the reliability of delivery and quality of his products.
Outsourcing Can Lower Costs
Internal company costs are a factor always to consider. In the end, it’s about building a solid organization with high performance in the healthcare industry. In the end, it might not be good business for Sani Nudge as a production company to employ the full line of skills needed. Having key personnel hired and closely connected with our teams but outsourcing things outside our core might be more important for 2022.
Details provided by Kenneth Jensen
Conclusion
In summary, 2021 was a year filled with growth and promise. Sani Nudge made leaps and bound with sustainable practices, organizational updates, and campaign fulfillment. The team at Sani Nudge is eager for the opportunities that the future holds for increasing hand hygiene levels in healthcare organizations and ultimately bettering patient safety worldwide.
