Becker's ASC Review

51 EXECUTIVE BRIEFING 3 EXECUTIVE BRIEFING SPONSORED BY Reduce your Workload and Do More Surgeries: 3 Perspectives on ease of throughput challenges in the SPD T he efficient function of an operating room depends on sterile processing departments (SPDs) to decontaminate, clean, and sterilize medical devices. Yet, SPD staff often do not know the number of trays they are expected to process on any given day, and have little input on the inventory of materials required to keep up with increasingly demanding schedules. Becker's Hospital Review recently spoke with three professionals who manage or liaise with SPDs: • Roger Fries Jr., SPD clinical manager of OrthoIndy Surgical Sites (Indianapolis, Brownsburg, Greenwood) • Ryan Pistone, Former orthopedic representative at Zimmer Biomet • Rick Martz, sales representative of ONE TRAY® and EZ- TRAX™ at 3T Medical Each representative shared their perspective on how ONE TRAY® and EZ-TRAX™ — a combination of an efficient rigid sterilization container and a new generation custom surgical set organizational system — can overhaul SPD workflows for increased efficiency and improved staff satisfaction. The excessive operational burden on crucial SPD staff often goes unacknowledged by surgical and administrative teams "It's a well-known fact in hospitals that busy ortho days are going to clog up every aspect of the sterile processing department," Mr. Pistone said. He painted a real-world scenario in which a busy surgeon performs up to 10 total joint replacement surgeries a day. "That's great for everybody in the hospital, except for sterile processing that's constantly turning [surgical instruments] over; it adds a big burden on them." This burden originates in part from the reprocessing workflow, which involves washing, decontaminating, cleaning, hand- inspecting, prepping, wrapping, and sterilizing the surgical instrumentation sets. The demands on throughput are often aggressive due to the fluctuating volume of surgical interventions and how limited the number of available sterilization trays and autoclaves there are. "On average, it takes about four and a half hours to process a surgical instrumental set using traditional sterilization containers," Mr. Pistone explained. The limited number of instrumentation sets elevates the need for faster processing between surgeries. "The biggest challenge is keeping up with the throughput of instrumentation and making sure that we have the volume of surgical instrumentation we need for the volume of cases that we're doing," Mr. Fries said. Mr. Martz agreed. "[SPD staff] have to make a decision on adding additional sets versus seeing if there is another way to get more utilization out of the current number of sets that they already have," he said. Both Mr. Fries and Mr. Martz noted that SPDs across the United States are often short-staffed, which also inhibits throughput. Another reason SPD staff are overwhelmed stems from the highly specialized nature of the surgical instrument sets which manufacturers design to cater to surgeons regardless of intervention techniques. For example, a total knee replacement procedure requires six to eight standard trays, even though the specific instruments used in most operations may only need three. Therefore, any unused instruments in an open tray must still be decontaminated, cleaned and re-sterilized. "Total joint vendors designed their trays that way because otherwise they would have a billion [customized] trays and it would be too complicated on their end. But that's not the best tray design for hospitals because it means surgical facilities are burdened with a bunch of trays and a bunch of instruments that will never be used," Mr. Pistone said. Improving efficiency is a top priority for SPDs – ONE TRAY® and EZ-TRAX™ provide options As noted, conventional sterile processing workflows are inefficient because of limited staff and materials coupled with increasing workloads. Innovative Sterilization Technologies rigid sterilization container, ONE TRAY®, incorporated with their EZ-TRAX™ organization system, optimizes efficiency by saving approximately 2hrs+ per case throughout the reprocessing cycle.* This includes savings in decontamination, cleaning, washing, sterilization (dry time not applicable), and in the OR. The EZ-TRAX™ modular system optimizes surgical set organization and offers better prioritization of total joint sets to reduce the number of trays from 6-8 to approximately 2-3. "That's a big deal for the ortho scrub tech to have a lot less

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