ScanCARE Blog

The price of a surgical instrument tracking system is an important consideration if you are considering moving to an automated solution. In order to put together a business case, you will, besides the cost, also need to know the difference between the various offerings and what you can expect to be included in each system.

Complying with Australian standards AS4187 or AS4815 can be a difficult task for any health care facility, but for office based health care facilities, physical space limitations can make it even more difficult. Finding space to wash, wrap and sterilize surgical instruments can be tricky for the smaller facilities and bench space is typically limited so finding space to put things can be a challenge.

AS2828.1 is a standard that specifies the requirements for the physical aspects of health records. It covers size, quality, layout, and colour. The objective of the standard is to improve the quality of health care by facilitating communication between healthcare professionals. Standardisation of medical record across health care facilities can help achieve this.

 Many healthcare operators today view integration of sterilizer and washer machine as essential or so it seems given how frequently Medical Practice Managers and CSSD Managers ask me questions on this topic. But is the really the "must have" that many of us think it is?

The latest version of AS/NZS 4187 released on the 15^th December 2014  brought some very significant changes to the previous standard. One of the most significant changes is the standards reference to Product Families.

In my blog "Here's how to make sense of the AS4187 categorisation of instrument product families", I provided an overview of ISO/TS 17665-3:2013 - Sterilization of health care products - Moist heat - Part 3: Guidance on the designation of a medical device to a product family and processing category for steam sterilization.

In today's post I will get into the specifics of how to apply the standard to a dental assessment tray.

Medical Forms and AS28281.1

A whole new world of benefits will open up to you when you move from a paper based medical records system to digital.

For example you can create custom lists of things like medications or health funds and link them to text pickers and select lists. This way, instead of having to use the keyboard, users users can select an item from a (dropdown) list. So accuracy is greatly improved because the risk of typing errors is minimised.

You also have the option of adding check boxes to select “yes/no” type checks and transfer data automatically from one text field to another, so you only have to type it once!

These are just a few example but digital medical records offer you so many options.  So let’s take a look at an example medical record and apply some digital magic to it.

Doctors, nurses and care givers having been doing medical rounds since time began.

Segen’s Medical dictionary defines rounds as:

‘Bedside visits by a physician—or other health professional—to evaluate treatment, assess current course and document the patient’s progress or recuperation’

(from: Segen's Medical Dictionary. © 2012 Farlex, Inc. All rights reserved.)

I don’t know how many tender documents I have filled out that contain questions about integration. Can it integrate with this, can it integrate with that?

It may seem a good idea to cover all bases and request technology vendors to integrate with your existing solutions. However in my experience integration can be complex to setup and maintain and it doesn’t always give you a lot of benefit. The risk in integrating systems from individual technology vendors is that your business continuity is now in the hands of two vendors who frequently have no partnership or existing or previous collaboration.

AS2828.1 specifies the requirements for the physical aspects of health records' size, quality, layout, colour, order of filing and record cover.

Although it appears to apply exclusively to paper based health records, AS2828.1 needs to be taken into account for health records that have been digitised from paper as well as Electronic health records.

Infection control and laser etching medical instruments.

In my blog What you need to know about Surgical Instrument Direct Part Marking (DPM), I wrote about the benefits of surgical instrument marking.  I also touched on some lesser known but important aspects that need to be considered.