Becker's Clinical Quality & Infection Control

25 Executive Briefing JB: At Symmetry Surgical, we recognize the need to help hospitals reduce their cost structure, especially following the impact of the pandemic. In response, we have created solutions that improve operational efficiencies and the cost of doing business without the need for a hospital to hire additional staff or incur significant costs. Our proprietary Instrument Inventory Solutions provide a comprehensive approach to improving surgical instrument data. Each solution has been designed to play a specific role in transforming instrument inventory data into actionable information. Our solutions enable surgical teams to improve instrument inventory data quality and provide powerful analyses that identify and prioritize set and vendor standardization opportunities to improve cost, efficiency and quality of care. These programs can be done virtually and can be a one-time project or performed regularly to maintain data integrity and standardization. Q: Are these solutions instrument tracking systems? JB: No. The Instrument Inventory Solutions empower surgical teams with pristine data and information from complex analyses so they can make the surgical service line more efficient and cost-effective. These solutions eliminate manual efforts to identify, correct, and organize data and can perform billions of analyses in a matter of hours — an effort that would ordinarily take a hospital months or even years to complete manually. We know information is power and without accurate data and standardized sets and vendors surgical service lines cannot operate in an optimal state. Q: What are the Instrument Inventory Solutions and how do they improve cost, efficiency, and quality of care? JB: We have three solutions consisting of proprietary software and databases that provide facilities with the accurate, complete and detailed information needed to make smart surgical set and vendor-related decisions that impact a facility's economic health. The Count Sheet Commander™ solution cleans and systematically organizes instrument inventory data so count sheets are accurate and complete. Count Sheet Commander identifies and corrects data integrity issues including missing, incomplete, or inaccurate vendors, part numbers, descriptions, product attributes and set ID numbers. With this information a hospital will have accurate preference cards, count sheets, set assembly and pulling, identification of critical instruments, and eliminate instrument type duplication across vendors. Count Sheet Commander then organizes instrument data and count sheets into a standardized nomenclature and sequence. With clean data, the OR and Sterile Processing teams will know EXACTLY what they have in their active inventory and on their count sheets. Set IQ™ is the Symmetry Surgical set standardization solution. This decision support tool conducts complex analyses to identify and prioritize set standardization opportunities by enabling facilities to know precisely what exists in inventory and the differences between sets. The current approach to obtaining this information requires manually opening and comparing sets to ascertain the differences in instrument type and count between sets and is a daunting, time-consuming task and can take months or even years. Using cleansed and normalized data, Set IQ analyzes each surgical set in the active inventory and compares the instrument type and count of each instrument type against all sets in the inventory. Set IQ can perform more than one billion analyses of set inventory and accurately identify and prioritize set standardization opportunities within 24 hours. In a world where knowledge is power, knowing what is in inventory can provide critical insights that can provide significant savings and transform how a hospital operates. Vendor IQ™ is proprietary software and a database that identifies vendor standardization opportunities. Using powerful software to analyze vendor codes across portfolios and surgical specialties, Vendor IQ identifies instrument codes that can be converted to the Symmetry Surgical portfolio of instruments and devices. This provides the hospital with an opportunity to aggregate spending with resulting lower pricing and supply chain efficiencies, reduction in non-compliant contracts, and erroneous off-contract spending that results in higher costs. Q: As a supplier and manufacturer, what is Symmetry Surgical's primary objective with Instrument Inventory Solutions? JB: At Symmetry Surgical, we recognize that our products' price and quality will always be important; however, the economic impact of the pandemic requires hospitals to quickly find other ways to improve their financial health. Hospitals need solutions that have a broader impact on their economic well-being. This type of innovative and disruptive solution addresses significant unmet customer needs, allowing surgical service lines to quickly achieve the "next level" of productivity, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. n Symmetry Surgical® is a leading healthcare technology and solutions provider of high-quality surgical instrumentation, a full line electrosurgery portfolio, and minimally invasive surgical devices. Symmetry Surgical maintains a rich legacy of trusted brands, quality, innovation, and customer service, supporting all surgical specialties and sites of care. While headquartered in Nashville, TN, they have a global reach and operate new product development, manufacturing, distribution, and sourcing facilities in Nashville, TN, Louisville, KY, Tuttlingen, Germany, and Melbourne, Australia. The Instrument Inventory Solutions empower surgical teams with pristine data and information from complex analyses so they can make the surgical service line more efficient and cost-effective."

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