Our office often receives calls involving injuries from a hospital acquired infection such as MRSA, C. diff., and others. As I tell most people, these are very tough cases to win, since a plaintiff needs to point to a particular act or omission (failing to wash hands, for example) that caused the infection. Almost always it cannot be done, and patients are left suffering from infections that modern medicine has just not figured out how to prevent yet.

Well, help is on the way, and it looks like R2D2 from Star Wars. Xenex has created a robot that comes into a hospital room and uses pulsed xenon ultraviolet light to quickly destroy harmful bacteria and other infection causing germs.

Here is a link to a story about their use in Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles:

[Children’s Hospital Los Angeles installs supergerm-zapping robots](http://www.bizjournals.com/losangeles/news/2015/09/16/childrens-hospital-los-angeles-installs-supergerm.html)

Don’t forget to check out the short video at the end of the article demonstrating the robots.

A brief trial run at Children’s saw a 10% reduction in infection rates, and other hospitals have seen more dramatic reductions.

The cost of a robot may be prohibitive for some hospitals, as they run about $100,000 each, but it may pay for itself with the numbers of infected patients it prevents. This author is hopeful that technological advances in the area of hospital acquired infections continues, as approximately 100,000 Americans die each year from such infections.