At The Experience Convention & Trade Show in Las Vegas recently, three university professors, two of whom were physicians, spent their days talking not with patients but with carpet cleaners and disaster restoration contractors.

Dr. Gavin Macgregor-Skinner, senior director at ISSA, brought two colleagues from academic medicine to the show floor: Dr. Rebecca Bascom, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, and Dr. Omrana Pasha-Razzak, Medical Professor with Department of Community Health and Social Medicine at CUNY School of Medicine.

The three sat down to talk about a new program ISSA calls the Cleaning Center of Excellence, and why doctors are showing up at a trade show built around extractors and moisture meters.

Cleaning in a doctor’s world

Bascom, who has spent decades treating lung disease, said the stakes of getting cleaning right go beyond appearances. “Cleaning is so important to people’s health,” Bascom said. “If cleaning is done properly, the environment is good for people. And if the cleaning isn’t done properly, it’s a real mess. And it’s a mess both for the people living in that environment, and it’s also a problem for the people doing the cleaning.” She added that in her decades as a lung doctor she has seen the good and the bad, and wants to partner with people interested in cleaning solutions that lead to better health.

Macgregor-Skinner, an epidemiologist, pointed to the pace of change in cleaning technology as the reason the timing matters now. “The cleaning industry, the world as a whole, is entering an extreme acceleration of new technologies, all kinds of technologies, including cleaning technologies,” he said. “Cleaning chemicals have exploded, the number that are available. Often it’s difficult for us to keep up with what the health effects of a lot of these technologies is, what the human effects are.” He said the moment calls for collaboration between the health sector and the cleaning industry, and between academics and practitioners, to determine whether new products and processes are being used to their full benefit.

Closing the knowledge-doing gap

Macgregor-Skinner, who has attended many industry trade shows, said the field is shifting from subjective judgments of cleanliness toward measurable ones. “We’re moving quite rapidly from it looks clean, I think it’s clean, subjectively it’s clean, to (what) we can measure clean, we can measure performance,” he said. He described a small cohort of contractors who already work from data and a much larger group still relying on visual inspection alone. “There’s another much larger cohort which is going, no, we clean the way we’ve always cleaned, and if it visually looks clean then it must be cleaned,” Macgregor-Skinner said. “But we’ve got new tools in the toolbox to verify cleanliness.”

He calls the space between collecting data and acting on it the knowledge-doing gap. “A lot of people are collecting data, information, measurements, but they don’t use it to make decisions,” he said. To close that gap, Macgregor-Skinner pointed to the EPIS Framework, a research-driven model built around exploration, preparedness, implementation and sustainment that helps organizations turn measurements into operational change. Contractors who apply it, he said, report a higher return on investment and a cleanliness level they can sustain, which in turn improves the health of a building and its occupants.

Borrowing medicine’s evidence revolution

Pasha-Razzak drew a direct line between where cleaning stands today and where medicine stood decades ago. “If you went back 50, 70, 75 years ago, medicine was also not evidence-driven,” she said. “Medicine was an apprenticeship. You as a young doctor went and worked with an older doctor, and they taught you what they knew and what they did. And sometimes what they knew and what they did was not really evidence-based. It was just what they did. It was the traditions.” She trained during medicine’s shift toward evidence-based practice and referenced the influential book “Crossing the Quality Chasm,” which pushed medicine away from being an opinion-based profession. “I think the cleaning industry is ready for that same kind of crossing the quality chasm,” Pasha-Razzak said, predicting that customer expectations, not regulation, will drive the change. “I think the customers are going to say, show me the evidence that you have cleaned my space.”

A community of practice with a big goal

The center’s approach, the three said, is to build what they call a community of practice, linking manufacturers, distributors, cleaning companies and facility managers with university researchers. Bascom described the concept as one built from conversations at trade shows, including with a trainer frustrated by 50-slide lectures that put audiences to sleep and an assessor who could only reach 20 people at a time. “I think that the center is a place where people with good ideas can come and say, how can we be part of something that’s bigger,” Bascom said.

The scale the group is aiming for is a million people trained. “Because we’ve done it before,” Macgregor-Skinner said. “Shoot for the stars.” The model relies on training master trainers who are then supervised and evaluated, rather than one-off sessions with no follow-up. “It’s really important that with all the technology we have right now, and we are university professors, we all teach at a university level, which we understand how adults learn,” he said. “What if we took those best practices, that methodology, to the cleaning industry?”

The work traces back three years to an Environmental Protection Agency-funded program called Making Safer Choices, which asked contractors how and why they made cleaning decisions. That research pointed to the need for a center that could bring people together to solve specific problems and then scale the solutions. Macgregor-Skinner cited a source of urgency: a patient who described watching a cleaner use the same rag on a hospital bathroom and then on his room. “We’re not talking about window dressing,” he said. “We’re talking about identifying critical moments in cleaning that are directly linked to measurable and well-known health risks.”

Making the invisible worker visible

Pasha-Razzak said one of the center’s goals is raising the profile of the people doing the work. “Everywhere you have been, everywhere you have traveled, everywhere you’ve sat, someone has cleaned that place,” she said. “Do you know who that someone is who cleans your places?” She said most people, in healthcare, in universities and in daily life, have never considered the answer, and that hospitality is one of the few industries that recognizes cleaning staff to any real degree.

Macgregor-Skinner made a similar point about the workforce itself. “Cleaning for me is a workforce that is invisible,” he said. “They’re not recognized. They work very hard.” He said bringing doctors and university scientists into the industry is part of a broader push for workforce development and recognition, since the outcomes of cleaning affect the health of a building’s surfaces, air and water.

Getting involved

All three said they came to the trade show to listen as much as to talk. “We feel like we can learn a lot from you, from the industry, and that’s one of the main reasons we come here to these trade shows, to learn,” Macgregor-Skinner said. Bascom and Pasha-Razzak echoed the call for collaboration, and Bascom closed with an invitation: “Bring us your ideas. If you have an idea and you’re wondering how to move it forward, let us see if we can help.”

Contractors, facility managers and manufacturers and anyone interested in the Cleaning Center of Excellence can connect by filling out the form through ISSA’s Making Safer Choices program.