Instrument tracking — a science of its own

Healthcare Purchasing News, March, 2003 by Carren Bersch

"Hospitals desperately need a system, and it is frustrating to get the system installed, spending time and money, and not have what is needed. It's great to know where a tray is, but how is it prepared?" Many hospitals are learning that some instrument tracking systems have limited scope. As an educator, Chobin was the contact person for St. Barnabas' Livingston Services Corp. and its partner in a new tracking venture, Healthcare Training Systems (HTS), Weston, CT.

At the end of this month in Chicago, an HTS system known as Trilogy will be unveiled at the 50th Congress of the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses. Trilogy is an integrated computer-assisted, training, testing and tracking system with interactive multimedia productivity software. Its self-paced, self-testing programs of mission-critical training encompass hundreds of interactive exercises with unlimited competency test questions that lead to certification. The tracking system provides customized, real-time instructional tools.

Also incorporated into Trilogy is HTS' Tray Maker program. Count sheets and tray sets can be created for individual surgical procedures that also highlight surgeon preferences, sterilization practices, reprocessing guidelines, decontamination procedures and surgical services procedures as identified by user requests. The instrument and tray update library allows the creation of thousands of additional instruments and images to be integrated into user-friendly tracking software.

Says Chobin, "I can use a digital camera to take a photograph of the surgical instruments in our hospital, download it to the software and customize our system. With the multimedia features, I can even create a video for procedures that require a video demonstration."

Paul Letersky, HTS' president, describes the multimedia advantages of producing a library of instruments and procedures within a hospital. "Our systems can involve full-motion video, full-color still pictures, animation, high-fidelity or speech-quality sound, and text, and any combination of these," he says. "It took us 200 hours to capture the 1,500 instruments and 700 interactive sessions in Trilogy." Using different media in one production offers hospitals the opportunity to combine them in away that fits the context in which they are used.

According the Chobin, the new system makes it possible for her to present learning components on a wide range of procedures -- how to put together various surgical instrument trays, how to clean and/or maintain an instrument -- and to adapt her system to the particular instruments needed in St. Barnabas' OR rooms with digital photography. "We can put together anything," she says.

Although implementing any system is, says Chobin, "very expensive upfront," the trend toward more intricate computer-based systems to train, test and track OR surgical instruments is being perceived, according to these experts, as a separate investment for hospitals, over and above that of their initial investment in the surgical tools themselves.