TRACK & TRACEABILITY
Is the future of instrument tracking already here?
Gordon Adam, director at Omega Surgical Instruments discusses how using RFID technology can not only enhance instrument tracking but also improve patient safety.
In 1998 ASANUS was founded by Mr Armin Schorer on the back of a long history of experience in the surgical instrument manufacturing business. He soon developed a large portfolio of high quality surgical instruments and became a highly respected manufacturer both in Germany and worldwide. In 2001 Omega Surgical Instruments became the organisation’s sole distributor in the UK and Northern Ireland for its instrumentation and the BarCon ARIS RFID Tracking System. During this time Armin recognised the problems faced by CSSD and theatres in being able to accurately track instruments at individual level. Over the next two decades the ASANUS BarCon and ARIS RFID tracking system was developed and is now in use in more than 100 hospitals worldwide. It has also recently been launched here in the UK. The product made such an
impression on the German domestic market that it resulted in ASANUS being presented with the Innovation award for development and realisation of a remarkable new 4.0 industrial solution by the Government of the state of Baden -Wurttemberg.1
While the origins of this product are
from Germany, the application of it sits well in the UK owing to its powerful software and RFID tracking capabilities which we firmly believe could assist us in “plugging the gaps” around what is currently being used today to track and trace trays. We know that current systems appear to track trays and instruments, but we also know that this is not possible unless you specifically identify the instrument and the tray to which it belongs. We are certain that no one has the capability of tracing an instrument to a patient used on a specific procedure on a specific day. As we know there are UK
requirements to trace the instruments through the decontamination and sterilisation and we feel that these standards need to be upgraded to track the instrument to point of use in theatres and then to be continually tracked during the cycle.
Limitations of current systems? Currently some of the problems encountered by hospitals across the UK are:
Patient safety: n Not accurately recording instruments used on specific patients. Generally only trays are tracked via a barcode system which we feel is only tracking a process
n By only tracking the tray and not identifying the contents exactly. There is no control over the content and ultimately this cannot prevent migration
n No real tracking of “high risk” instruments or supplementary instruments
n “Never event” of retained surgical instruments.
Productivity in the theatre and sterilisation departments: n The time wasted due to the loss or misplacement of trays and supplementary instruments. We know this occurs in every hospital and this is both disruptive to TSSU and Theatres and we know there are associated cost pressures because of these events. It has been estimated that these types of events occur about 10% of the time and could cost around £35 per “glitch”. If you multiply this by the amount of times
OPERATING THEATRE l JULY 2018 l 43
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