Solving your Surgical Instrumentation Backlog with Tray Consolidation

Surgical volume growth and scaling the entire surgical supply chain has a weak link: the ability for the sterile processing department (SPD) to scale with surgical volume.

Steadily increasing numbers of instruments per tray and number of trays per case have outpaced the investment in SPD and creates a bottleneck that puts at risk the ability to maintain or increase surgical volume. Rationalizing trays achieves the first goal of reducing overall instrument counts. Consolidating trays and reducing the overall number of trays per case is the next hurdle in alleviating the supply chain challenge in SPD.

That’s where the OpFlow instrument tray consolidation engine brings about another major innovation. By consolidating trays and reducing the number of trays per procedure, OpFlow generates a Net Instrument / Tray Effect:

The tray rationalization process leverages actual instrument usage data to remove all surplus (unused) instruments from a given tray through analytics run with a lean methodology approach. Once rationalized, the tray consolidation step will compare any set of instrument trays to determine overlap or redundancy, and identify opportunities for tray consolidation. Moreover, since the instrument count has already been reduced through the rationalization process, it is feasible to merge small quantity (but high usage) trays with the workhorse trays. We ensure viability of those combinations by running analytics on specific tray usage across surgeon preference cards, procedure groups and service lines.

Consolidation of trays is complex due to the use of a given tray across multiple services lines and possibly hundreds of preference cards.

In order to consolidate trays, there must be a corollary target (i.e. ‘workhorse’) tray associated with each procedure to which the instruments can be moved. Further complicating this process is that not all instruments can reside in the same trays. Following sterilization rules by instrument type and re-allocating the instruments to existing trays accordingly is the first step. Ensuring that the quantity of the tray being consolidated and the workhorse tray have the same number of instances or exact copies is next in the sequence.

In scenarios where the number of workhorse trays exceeds the number of small trays proposed for consolidation, it may be an option to purchase or re-allocate additional small trays of that type to complete the consolidation. Conversely, this scenario may indicate an opportunity to reduce the number of instances of the workhorse tray.

The OpFlow platform runs analytics on tray usage based on surgical case volume to determine if the number of copies of the workhorse tray can be reduced, generating additional instruments for re-allocation, while also enabling the opportunity for uniform, newly consolidated trays.

The robust OpFlow analytics engine runs all of the aforementioned scenarios and shows the “Net Instrument Effect,” which is the quantity of excess or re-allocated/purchased instruments to finish consolidation. If the effect is neutral or positive, the consolidation is simple. For scenarios in which re-allocation/purchase is needed, our engine calculates the value derived for tray processing avoidance versus instrument cost.

“Net Tray Effect” is the reduction in number of times trays are processed on average per service line or case. Consolidation reduces the “Net Tray Effect,” and along with “Net Instrument Effect” enables solid decision-making on the value derived from each change.

The end result is the product of compounding benefits: reduced instrument count per tray → fewer instrument trays brought to the OR → fewer trays requiring processing in SPD. That dramatically improves throughput of trays in SPD and alleviates the bottleneck that is caused by the excess tray burden. This translates into instrument trays that are processed in a more efficient and timely fashion, with even greater precision and care, by an SPD team that is no longer unnecessarily overworked and faced with a daily backlog.

UncategorizedOctober 4, 2019