How much can a hospital save with instrument tray rationalization?
The data that OpFlow has collected on actual instrument usage confirms the reports published in the surgical literature: in general, less than 20% of instruments opened for a case are actually used. The OpFlow analytics platform factors in variables (procedure, surgeon, service line) in order to rationalize a given instrument tray for its optimal configuration, while ensuring surgical performance and patient safety are preserved.. Through that process, OpFlow has consistently reduced major/workhorse instrument trays by more than 35%.
So that leads to the key question, how much does this reduce hospital expenses each year?
While OpFlow services can be applied to every instrument tray in a hospital, for the purposes of this example, we will focus on the major/workhorse trays that comprise a high usage frequency of the instrument fleet. A hospital typically has 30 to 40 types of these trays, and at least 10 copies (or instances) of each tray type to accommodate case scheduling. Each of those trays generally is comprised of an average of 100 instruments. That’s a total of 35,000 instruments across those trays, and a reduction of 35% means that 12,250 instruments will be removed.
Now, let’s look at the cost savings opportunity that creates...
There is variation in the expense for sterile processing, with reported costs ranging from $0.51 to $3.19 per instrument. Those figures incorporate the variable labor and personnel operating costs incurred on a per-instrument basis. For the purposes of our calculation, we will use the commonly accepted re-processing cost of $0.77 per instrument.
Conservatively, each of those 350 workhorse trays will have a usage of 50 times per year at an average-volume hospital (12,000 surgical cases per year). By removing those 12,250 instruments at a re-processing cost of $0.77 per instrument, there is a $471,625 savings on sterile processing for the hospital each year.
That’s just for re-processing. It is important to also point out that there are now 12,250 instruments that will no longer undergo the depreciation that takes place with each processing cycle, avoiding recurring costs on maintenance, repair and replacement. When considering the average cost of an instrument amortized over the typical 7-year lifespan, that equates to a savings of $262,500 on instrument maintenance and re-purchase annually.
Granted, these only represent the immediate, hard-dollar savings. There are many other cost-reduction advantages to having leaner instrument trays, including faster sterile processing throughput, decreased OR set-up and in-room time, shorter turnover time between cases, fewer instrument tray processing errors, reduced employee attrition, and mitigation of regulatory citations.
Would your hospital be interested in saving more than $2.2 million over the next 3 years by removing excess, unused instruments?