Data Analysis of Vascular Surgery Instrument Trays Yield Large Cost and Efficiency Savings
Dr. Knowles recently presented the impact of OpFlow instrument tray rationalization at the 44th Annual Meeting of The Southern Association for Vascular Surgery.
As part of a larger, hospital-wide project, this 3-month data collection and analytics-driven tray rationalization process yielded impressive results.
After review, 40.1% of instruments were removed from the vascular tray and 62.5% from the aortic tray. A total of 780 instruments were removed from the 13 instances of the vascular tray, and 475 from the 5 instances of the aortic tray for a total of 1,275 instruments that could be used an inventory, re-purposed for other trays, and no longer incurred avoidable depreciation from unnecessary processing.
The removal of the instruments yielded an estimated cost savings of $62,750 for repurchase and $97,444 in re-sterilization savings. Yearly, the removal of the instruments is projected to save 316.2 hours of personnel time alone for the sterile processing department in tray assembly and significantly reduced the table set-up time in the OR.
His findings concluded that given increasing cost constraints in healthcare, sterile processing remains an untapped resource for cost improvement. Data analysis provides the ability to make sweeping decisions in tray management that otherwise cannot be performed reliably.
