Supply Chain

  • Managing the purchase of new instruments and supplies is a challenge within hospitals to keep in stock required component to not affect surgical volume. 

  • Streamlining the trays and removing non-essential items lowers the overall cost per tray.  The removed instruments go back into inventory and supply chain and materials managements teams can lower purchase costs for those instruments.

Data collection and validation

  • OR staff work with onsite data collection resource to provide feed on instrument usage and patient-safety related instrumentation.

  • Surgical technologists and nurse circulators are engaged during the collection and validation. Typically, the data collection process takes less than 90 seconds per case.

Service line reviews for approvals

  • Service-line reviews occur with assigned team members that are intimately familiar with the service line. A robust process for review includes all members of the surgical team that includes reviewing of the data, tray proposals, and feedback. This allows for a smooth transition to sign-off on trays. Surgeon reviews and approvals are completed after the service-line reviews are complete.

Improved efficiency

  • Time studies have shown that set-up and breakdown time in the room is improved with more efficient trays. One study conducted by OpFlow in the vascular service line showed the operating room table set-up decreased from a mean of 7:44 to 5:02 minutes (P<.0001) for the vascular tray, and form 8:53 to 4:56 minutes (P<.0001) for the aortic tray. [REF: Knowles M, et al. Data analysis of vascular surgery instrument trays yielded large cost and efficiency savings. J Vasc Surg. 2021 Jun;73(6):2144-2153].

 
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Central / Sterile Processing

 

  • Sterile processing team members are engaged during the service line reviews to provide feedback on IFU compliance by instrument and tray type for consolidation.  The SPD teams are involved throughout the tray conversion/update process to enable a smooth transition to the optimized configurations.

 
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Tray conversions

 

  • After all approvals are complete, a schedule is built to convert the trays in the SPD.  Tray conversions for each tray type are scheduled so as to not disrupt surgical volume. Once trays are converted, OpFlow provides materials management with a report of the specific instruments and quantity removed and sterile processing can re-allocate those instruments back into inventory.