SurgiCount Safety-Sponge Keeps Used Medical Supplies Out of Your Body
Since about a thousand sponges are left inside patients who undergo surgery each year, SurgiCount is trying to sell this "Safety-Sponge System" which uses a 2D barcode system on each sponge and a handheld scanner to keep track of every sponge utilized. It's a great idea, but since it's likely the sponges would have to be purchased from SurgiCount, it's hard to say how much cost the system would add to a busy operating room.
Of course, it would only have to cost less than the malpractice payouts for those who find themselves with a rogue sponge inside their bodies, which often lead to infection or worse.
Company Page [SurgiCountMedical.com via Oh Gizmo via 7 Gadgets]
the latest
latest episodes
As has been suggested before, this is an area where RFID tags would be perfect. Doctors could just wave a wand over the patient and be informed what devices remain behind.
Plus, it's an industry standard so there's no vendor lock-in.
I wonder why they haven't figured out how to make a bio-degradable sponge yet. One that works for about 8-10 hours and then lets your body eat it. Or maybe I don't know anything about medicine and this is the wrong way to look at it.
I'm not sure this wouldn't cause more problems than it solves.
I would imagine surgeons are lecture-d, seminar-ed, memorandum-ed, and otherwise COMPLETELY forewarned about the dangers of sponge-leaving and the massive slam-dunk lawsuits that follow from it. It happens anyway because you can always have a careless moment.
If you can remember to record a sponge going in infallibly (which is the assumption all this rests on), you can remember to take it out infallibly--and if that were true, we wouldn't need the device in the first place.
Worse, I'd worry that an EXTRA sponge got recorded (inadvertent double-click or something) and that I was left open while a panicky surgeon poked around my organs looking for a non-existent sponge.
Amirite? Any surgical types out there?
How about something like those pill packets with the days on? Or maybe an egg tray e.g.
Take sponge out of slot/pocket/cup, use in body. remove from body put in an empty slot. End of op' just before stitching up. Check for empty spaces in the device/tray.
I don't have any surgical experience, well only on the receiving end. So same question as Semiotix.
Any surgical types out there?
I'm not a surgeon or even anything similar, but surely the purpose of a sponge would be to soak up whatever fluids are oozing around your cavities. So what happens when a spot of that blood or bile obscures part of the barcode?
I think RFID might be a good idea, provided it can stand up to being gamma irradiated during sterilisation.
Maybe it's time for a new acronym. Similar to INAL (I'm not a lawyer) INAS (I'm not a surgeon). I think it's traditional to follow up INAL with the word but...