All the while, health care workers face a common pressure known as the “triple squeeze.” Rising rates of chronic disease, an aging population and health care worker shortages mean health care workers are doing more with fewer resources. Everyone hopes for solutions that free up these frontline workers’ time and resources, allowing them to do what they do best, which is spend time with patients.
In the UK alone, 7.22 million people were waiting for treatment in February 2023, with 3 million patients waiting more than 18 weeks, according to the BMA. About 362,500 of those patients have been waiting for treatment for more than a year, which is 169 times longer than before the start of the pandemic.
There are many different types of surgeries, such as cataract surgery and caesarean sections, and each operating room has a corresponding sterile surgical kit. Once the procedure is performed, the dirty instruments need to be packaged and returned to the sterile services facility, usually at a separate location. Typically, these kits are wrapped in plastic to protect them from airborne bacteria before being coded and stored for next use.
While this sterilization process is great in theory—it’s easy to make mistakes. Imagine if a surgeon had to perform multiple surgeries using the same limited equipment. How do you ensure that trays are within their shelf life and used in an efficient order before re-sterilization? How can the tray be traced back to the patient to check whether the device remains in the body or to alleviate concerns about associated complications?
If items are lost, the initial strategy should be to find them. But this search can take up a lot of time for clinicians every day. In one study, eight clinicians spent nearly four hours looking for relevant items.
If the item isn’t easy to find, or is difficult to find, a priority might be to purchase additional inventory so no one spends time looking for it a second time. But the price of surgical equipment is high, so the cost of this method is also high. Consider unnecessary pallet cleaning due to poor inventory management and additional energy costs and carbon emissions. Then consider the inability to pinpoint the location of the instrument, which in the worst case scenario could add additional procedures like X-rays and a whole lot of extra anxiety.
Speaking of X-rays, there is another invisible wave called radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. RFID readers can be used as part of a broader tracking solution for items. In other vertical industries, such as retail and warehousing, RFID technology is used in warehouses to provide instant access to inventory.
To eliminate “clinician extra tasks” by enabling automation, RFID technology infrastructure can be deployed strategically around healthcare facilities. RFID antennas and RFID readers placed around entry and exit points in operating rooms, storage rooms, or elsewhere (such as at processing tables or autoclaves) can report item location. Each time an item leaves or returns, its unique identification number is automatically recorded via an RFID tag, which is engineered to withstand whatever the medical device, surgical instrument or kit is subjected to.
These RFID devices are connected to a database that contains data associated with each asset being tracked and the hospital’s workflow. For surgical trays, this would include the last recorded location, when it was last cleaned, which patients it was used with, etc.
In fact, one hospital in the UK recently completed a sterile services RFID project as part of a wider location solution. As a result, they can now search for surgical trays on their computers and use RFID technology to know their approximate location in the storage room. Even if a surgical tray is in the wrong place, it will be detected. This also has huge benefits for patients as their surgeries will not be canceled due to a lack of sterile trays and instruments.
Risk reduction is also critical. For example, if a cardiac surgery instrument tray falls, another tray can be found within seconds, ensuring that delays to critical surgeries are minimized. The hospital’s clinical team said they have seen improvements in patient care, as well as time savings and reduced procurement costs. With RFID technology, time spent searching for items is reduced and disinfection becomes more efficient. Additionally, all of this freed up time and resources can be reinvested in patient care.
U.S. regulations require that UDI be placed on every surgical tool after 2020. Europe has also followed this approach and plans to complete it by 2027. This is because surgical instruments have a useful life and need to be avoided from being lost. Therefore, it is necessary to provide complete product labeling rules for the safe use and storage of all medical instruments for strict management. Additionally, setting up surgical tools can be time-consuming even for skilled and experienced operators.
Although it is a global trend to mandate ID numbers on each surgical tool, it is difficult to record manually and accurately manage usage time, and it takes a lot of time and manpower to assemble and inspect the entire set of tools. If laser is used, Marking can easily cause the instruments to rust and stain. It will be very time-consuming to use QR codes to read the IDs one by one, which causes great trouble in the management of surgical tools.
Managing surgical instruments through RFID technology has considerable advantages, which will improve the safety and efficiency of the surgical process, because in addition to being used as a unique ID, RFID tags can also record the use time and service life of surgical tools, making management more convenient. Easier, faster batch reading using RFID handheld terminals allows operators to efficiently assemble and inspect entire tool sets. In addition, RFID electronic tags can record the number of times each tool is used to reduce excessive inventory, and can record the order of use to optimize the preparation of preoperative tools.
Post time: Dec-11-2023