Marking surgical instruments isn’t just one of the best ways to manage and protect your surgical asset investment—it’s also a surefire way to make your facility, and by extension your patients, safer. If you’ve never marked your instruments or only mark to the tray level, here are a few of the safety benefits you can gain when you mark your surgical instruments all the way down to the individual asset level.
It Makes Maintenance and Repair Easier and More Streamlined
Assets in need of maintenance or repair pose a serious threat to patient safety. When you mark your instruments, it’s easier for your team of technicians to track down assets that need repair or maintenance, preventing those assets from re-entering the perioperative loop before they’ve been properly serviced. It also frees you up from relying on arbitrary schedules that often over maintenance instruments and result in unnecessary cost.
It Ensures Correct and On-time Assembly to Avoid Surgical Delays
Gone are the days where central sterile professionals need to have entire trays or certain surgeons’ preferences memorized or rely on paper handouts to assemble trays. With all of your surgical instruments marked, you can pair your marked instruments with tracking software that alerts technicians when a tray is incomplete, has the wrong asset added to it, and more. You can even ensure that trays are assembled correctly and in the right order to avoid causing any delays in the operating room.
It Gives You Traceability Down to the Patient
With all the technology available to facilities, there’s no reason patient safety should be a cause for concern anymore. Marking your surgical instruments gives you complete traceability down to each patient to see exactly which instrument was used in any given case on any given patient. Should a situation require you to hunt down and recall an instrument for any purpose to protect your patients, you can do so quickly and accurately
If an asset ever does need to be recalled, CensiTrac can help your technicians do so in just a few clicks. Because each instrument is marked, technicians can quickly find details on the last scanned location of each recalled tray and/or instrument! This ensures that you never miss an asset during a recall and that patients aren’t ever in danger as you do so.
It Protects Your Facility and Your Technicians
Marking surgical instruments and then setting up automated tracking of those instruments within their trays can also protect your facility and technicians. For example, with our instrument tracking solution, CensiTrac, managers can set up instructions, alerts, and training tips to accompany each tray— particularly helpful in the assembly and sterilization steps. As technicians prepare assets for sterilization, they get both visual and audible messages to guide them through the process. An example of an alert they might get is a notification of a mismatch between the assets included in a load and the sterilization method that’s chosen—protecting your technicians from making mistakes.
Marking Your Surgical Instruments
What about you— considering marking your surgical instruments? Not only will you save time and money in the long run, but you’ll also get all of the safety benefits outlined above. With our CensiMark service, you don’t have to worry about any part of the process when you take on marking your instruments. We take care of it all without disrupting your workflow. Ready to learn more? Reach out to our team of experts to get started!
