Have you ever read an IPC report that says something along the lines of “we did lots of observational hand hygiene compliance auditing, and compliance was 99%”? Well, we know that back in the real world hand hygiene compliance is typically 40%. Whilst we can do better with observational hand hygiene compliance audits, and make them a realistic starting point for improvement, there’s a real opportunity for automated hand hygiene monitoring systems to come in and shake up our understanding of hand hygiene compliance in a really positive way. But are the systems up to it? And are we ready for them? Today’s study in Infection Prevention in Practice from Denmark shows that an automated hand hygiene system can be implemented and generate some really useful hand hygiene surveillance information.