Hospitals Soak Up Technology For Sponge Counts

Most hospitals require clinicians to conduct manual sponge counts both before and after each surgical procedure to ensure sponges that were used are removed before the patient is sewn up. But these procedures aren't always followed, and as a result it's all too common for sponges to be left inside patients, says Alex Macario, M.D., who last year led a study at Stanford University Medical Center to determine if RFID technology could be used to help reduce such errors. The study, which was funded by grants from the Small Business Innovation Research Program and the National Institutes of Health, involved using surgical sponges that had been embedded with passive RFID tags. The technology, from ClearCount Medical Solutions, Pittsburgh, has not yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration and is not yet commercially available. During the study, 28 of the vendor's RFID sponges were intentionally left in eight patients ...