Every piece of equipment in an operating room is crucial to saving a life. What happens if sterile supplies such as surgical blades, surgical cameras, sterile sutures, staples, etc. are taken and couldn’t be traced back to the person responsible? One incident, in particular, occurring just last year involved a medical employee stealing over $100,000 worth of medical supplies. This affected the hospital as a whole and lead to financial losses and inefficiencies in the healthcare facility. How can you manage access to sterile supplies in the OR so an incident like this doesn’t occur in your facility?
According to the Daily News Online, she used her access to different supply rooms to retrieve multiple medical utensils and other equipment. She was sentenced to four months in prison and 5 years of probation, and was forced to pay back $30,000 worth of medical equipment stolen.
So What Can You Do?
Just one story of many paints a picture of how vital hospital and OR equipment is and how significant secured access to these said supplies should be. To help this situation, healthcare industries can use readily available technology to generate secure storage of OR/CS supplies.
How We Can Help YOU
With the Hanel Rotomat vertical carousel, all valuable equipment is stored within an enclosed unit, under lock and key. Sliding doors that feature lock protection protect surgical supplies from unauthorized access, as well from dirt and grim within the air. There are multiple options for further protection such as: password access, keycard swipe, barcode scan, and RFID readers.
The security provided by the Rotomat reduces costs, since items will not need to be replaced as often. Hospitals, in total, would experience fewer supply shortages that could be caused by cross contamination and inventory mistakes when automated storage and retrieval systems are holding inventory.
Software within the Rotomat allows hospitals to track its surgical supply count with a complete audit trail, essentially providing a fingerprint for each transaction. The system keeps track of who removed supplies from storage, how much was taken out, and when it occurred.
When you think about how much you could save you don’t even think about the storage space you’d be saving. The Rotomat is designed vertically to provide more space in your facility. This in turn, would allow the space needing security to be a small condensed area rather than an entire room or facility. Risk of injury is also reduced for all employees because heavy lifting, bending, and reaching, is no longer needed as the Rotomat vertical carousel brings everything to you.
So many benefits come from using a Hanel Rotomat. Contact us at 205-988-3300 to further learn how the Rotomat could utilize your space efficiently.