Listen to Drora Ben Michael-Winkar, Deputy Chief Operating Officer and Inbar Weitzman, Head of Surgical Nursing, as they share their personal experience with Snap&Go technology.
What is the most important thing to have in the system?
“This is the first time we are using a system that documents all the items we use in surgery. Operating rooms are our most expensive “product line.” And until today, we don’t fully know what was going on. The system must be user-friendly. The system must work quickly, with a minimum time of expensive nursing staff. We can quickly replenish all items and document everything in patients’ records like regulations require. This equipment, which is the bulk of equipment in a large organization like a hospital, needs to be managed much, much more precisely and save time on manual labor.”
What is the advantage of the system?
“Everything is saved. I see the photos. If there’s a mistake, I can cancel. Everything is saved in the patient’s record. There wasn’t a connection between the patient’s record and the implant and this system enables it simple and easy. It’s important for the patient and for the future. It’s the Ministry of Health’s regulations that we know what was used and if there is an item that is recalled it’s easy to find.”
“It’s revolutionary in my opinion. The greatest advantage is the logistics. Stock management in a department that sees millions of Shekels worth of products that in reality, no one knows what happens to these items. We can know if a surgical procedure was very expensive or if a surgeon’s procedures are overly expensive and someone can ask him to explain. . . . Today, I don’t have this information. And what about the stock that was ordered and just sits on the shelves? Stock that has expired or not managed correctly. . . . . .. A very large part of our budget goes to surgical supplies and we’d like to manage it better.”
“In the broader picture of the whole hospital, we’d like to know the true costs of all our activities. . . . How to better budget surgeries, how much the procedure cost? As a director, this is very important to me.
The operating room has been a real “black hole.” We stock them with supplies and don’t know what is used and what is not.”
What was before the system was installed?
“Often, we have situations in which we are missing items because the Material management employee just comes and looks at the shelves and sometimes misses things. We’ve even had to call him in at night. In the past, they tried to implement systems for tracking and reporting. They were not easy to use and the staff did not cooperate.”
“All the experiments failed – big time! The usage reporting was near zero. We had huge discrepancies in stock management and we stopped using them. This time, this very user-friendly system easily allows us to reach almost 100% reporting . . . . 96, 97%. This system is excellent! Easy to photograph each item. It reports correctly and, in the background, computers handle everything.”
How does the system adapt to the current workflow?
“It’s not dependent on our ERP system. If an SKU does not match our master records, the item is transferred to another folder, not to stop the flow of data. It knows how to connect the implant manufacturer’s catalog number with our internal SKU, and in our case, also with the GPO’s SKU.
The system reports items that could not be paired and our Materials coordinator quickly fixes them. We have 10 operating rooms. We added the devices to all rooms on the same day, at the same time they all began reporting immediately. It took three days, because we have a large staff, to train everyone, and afterward there were very few problems.”
“We’ve been working with IDENTI for 4 years, I believe. We introduced several devices into our operating rooms that effectively improved our inventory management from end to end. . . . Everything is reported automatically to our suppliers; they replenish on time. We’ve reduced time and effort to zero – REALLY ZERO..”
