Just because it’s simple doesn’t make it easy. Take a look at habits.

Do you floss? We all know the advantages, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to do it. Yet only 28 percent of people say they floss regularly. How about covering your mouth when you cough? Again, it’s not difficult, but we all know people who fail to grasp the concept.

Unfortunately, the same is true for hand-washing. It’s one of the easiest and most beneficial habits a person can have. Yet, 95 percent of people do not wash their hands properly, and some studies say as many as 20 percent of people don’t wash their hands at all after using the restroom.

Most of us would assume this isn’t a problem in the medical profession. Statistic after statistic — as well as common sense — demonstrates how important hand hygiene is to safe patient care. If anyone should be in the habit of washing their hands regularly, it should be people who care for ill patients every day.

Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. An estimated 2 million patients get a hospital-related infection every year, and almost 99,000 of those patients die, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Poor hand hygiene is a known contributor to these types of infections, as hand hygiene compliance averages just 47.5 percent according to the Center for Transforming Healthcare.

The reasons behind this alarming trend are many, but the most common is a time crunch. In 2012, the Physicians Foundation, a nonprofit group, surveyed 13,575 doctors across the United States and found that 39.8 percent see 11 to 20 patients per day, and 26.8 percent see 21 to 30 a day. With so many patients, medical personnel either forget or don’t want to “waste time” washing or sanitizing their hands again and again.

Fortunately, the medical profession seems much closer to solving this problem than the common cold (one of those viruses that poor hand hygiene helps spread). Clean-hands programs are now the norm at most medical facilities. And organizations are constantly working to find more solutions.

In 2011, UMass Medical School piloted an electronic reminder program that involves an electronic network of hand hygiene dispensers and room entry-exit monitors to capture all hand-washing events occurring in the ICU. It uses room entry/exit chimes, real-time computer monitor feedback displays of unit-wide hand hygiene performance, and performance reports to managers. In a 171-day trial, UMass experienced a 24 percent increase in general hand-hygiene events (times staff members washed their hands) in the test ICU, and a 40 percent increase when a staff member entered or exited a room. The bottom line is staff wash their hands far more often with the reminders. The system has since been patented by UMass and Ultraclenz, which is selling it to other health care organizations.

The 2011 book SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt goes into detail about the problem Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles was having with hand hygiene. After a number of failed attempts by the hospital’s board to fix the problem, the staff epidemiologist proposed a different approach. Since the committee was telling other physicians how to behave, the epidemiologist wondered how clean their own hands were. She pulled 20 Petri dishes and swabbed the palms of the committee members. Sure enough, the majority came back carrying harmful bacteria. The pictures of the bacteria found on the palm prints were then set as the screensavers on most of the hospital’s computers — a constant, visual reminder of the cost of poor hand hygiene. The result was 98 percent compliance.

Coincidently, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center’s hand hygiene initiatives also were mentioned in a recent “Sustaining and Spreading Improvement in Hand Hygiene Compliance.” The hospital was one of the eight hospitals that convened teams of experts in performance improvement and infections for the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare’s hand hygiene quality improvement project, which was conducted from Dec. 2008 through Sept. 2010. The project’s initial data revealed hand hygiene compliance averaged just 47.5 percent across its eight partnering hospitals. Key causes varied greatly among the hospitals. So each hospital developed and implemented specific interventions targeted to its most important causes of hand hygiene noncompliance (such as the screensavers). In the end, the project saw a 70.5 percent increase in compliance across the eight hospitals. Even better, that level of performance was sustained for 11 months through the end of the project period.

Efforts like these are remarkably important, as they’re not only benefiting patients but also saving up to $2.8 million in direct medical costs a year, according to the Center.

But as I stated at the start, just because a habit is simple, and the benefits are great doesn’t mean it’s easy. Fortunately, we continue to make strides toward turning bad hand hygiene habits into good ones.

Daniel J. Castillo is medical director, the Joint Commission.