Reducing Hospital-acquired Infections
Jay and I sat down with Sam Perkins, CEO of Pūrgenix™, a company that has developed a technology that enables healthcare organizations to contain, and in fact, reduce rates of occurrence of hospital-acquired infections. It is well known that pathogens such as MRSA and Clostridium difficile are challenging to treat and equally challenging to eradicate from a care environment once they have taken hold. The Pūrgenix™ platform addresses a component that is often overlooked in dealing with these dangerous organisms—the air.
Sam shared how they saw a need for a new solution to eliminating illness-causing organisms from the hospital environment, ultimately developing a system that is custom-designed and installed to be installed into the building’s air handling units. The Pūrgenix™ system employs powerful UV lights that use energy to kill air-borne organisms as they pass into the air handler from the return and again on the way back to the environment on the downstream side.
He shared some use-case examples where client hospitals were able to successfully reduce occurrences of infections for their patients, as well as experiencing a measurable reduction in absenteeism among their employees due to illness.
Sam also explained that deposits, including bioburden that is created by bacteria, as thin as a micron (a piece of paper is ~6 microns thick) can significantly reduce the cooling efficiency of a building’s air handling unit. By preventing a build-up of bacteria within the unit on the cooling coils, the deposit of bioburden is eliminated, leading to marked increases in energy cost to condition the environment of the building.
Pūrgenix™ creates PūrHospitals™, an environment in which patients and employees experience a purer
environment where they can heal and work. Hospitals deploying the system can advertise their status as PūrHospitals™, letting patients in the community know their environment is safer with less risk of hospital-acquired infection. As Mark Haney, President at WellStar Paulding Hospital, said about the Pūrgenix™ solution at the launch of their new hospital: “…we still have to do the basics, but we have the building working for us now.”
Special Guest:
Sam Perkins, CEO, Pūrgenix™ 
