Challenge

As a leading Children’s Hospital that performs many complex surgical cases each week, several inventory challenges
existed including:

  • Limited Bandwidth: With an average of 4.8 trays per case, the Sterile Processing Department spent an enormous amount of dedicated time to printing labels, manually labeling trays, and developing their own nomenclature for specific items. Without a streamlined process, the team was inefficient and spending too much time managing trays.
  • Vendor-Managed Inventory (VMI) Complexities: Loaner trays from the vendor representatives were rarely on time.
    On average, vendor representatives would receive a notification 8.6 days before the surgery and would deliver trays
    12 hours before the case. In fact, 83% of the trays were delivered in less than 24 hours before the surgery. This required
    the Sterile Processing Department to spend a significant amount of time trying to locate the trays and identify arrival.
  • VMI Inaccuracies: Many trays would arrive without the appropriate amount of sets. This required a considerable
    amount of personal follow up from the Sterile Processing Department to the vendor representatives.

Solution

This Children’s Hospital implemented ReadySet Surgical’s Track & Coordinate solution for loaner equipment.
Vendor reps benefits:

  • Real-time case invitations
  • Efficient check in of loaner trays
  • Total transparency

SPD staff benefits:

  • Real-time tray status
  • Daily case cart planning
  • Total transparency

Results

After implementation, the Children’s Hospital gained several efficiencies in their loaner management processes, including:

  • Continuous communication between the Vendor Representatives and Sterile Processing Department which increased the notification lead time from 8.6 days to 14.3 days before a case, or an increase of 66.3% lead time.
  • Better communication ensured that loaner trays arrived from 8 hours before a case to an average of 48 hours before a case, a 500% increase.
  • Automated instrument tracking which increased the accuracy of the trays and decreased the workload for the Sterile Processing Department.
  • Inventory images provided the transparency the Sterile Processing Department needed which resulted in less fees because of inaccurate reporting on “lost sets.”

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