The SurgiCount product has been available for years, but Stryker is now standing by its product in a unique and perhaps rarely confident way. The device company is calling it the SurgiCount Promise. Stryker has announced that it is now providing $5 million in indemnity protection, a money-back guarantee for customers using the system.
Nate Miersma, marketing director at Kalamazoo, Michigan-based Stryker, shared in an interview how the SurgiCount sponges and technology works and why it’s important.
Can you share more about SurgiCount and the ways it’s beneficial compared to what has previously been practiced during surgery?
Today in operating rooms across the country, these little white gauze sponges are used to soak up fluids during surgery, opened in packs of five or 10, and a nurse manually counts each one out loud while someone else watches. The person watching writes down the number of sponges used on a whiteboard. In a surgical case, anywhere from 10 to 300 sponges might be used.
As you can imagine, this is problematic – mostly because healthcare has become more complex and demands on an operating room staff of continued to grow over time. They’re not just counting sponges. There are many other things to count, distractions, in terms of equipment and medication, this is in addition to background noises and music. Counting by yourself is problematic. We are humans, we are prone to error, and it’s nobody’s fault.
About 11 times a day there is a retained sponge that was left behind due to a miscount. The sad part is, they are completely preventable.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
How does SurgiCount actually work to make these incidents preventable?
Our sponges have something on them much like a QR code, laminated on the corner of each sponge, and that code uniquely identifies each sponge that is used. On the outside of each package of sponges, there is a data matrix tag that reflects the sponges in it. So each time you open a new package of SurgiCount sponges, you scan it with our scanner, and you know which ones are being used.
Then after a procedure, you manually scan each one of those sponges out. This product reconciles the sponges that were scanned in and then the ones that were scanned out. If it doesn’t match up, it will tell you not only how many are missing, but specifically which ones. It won’t let you accidentally double count.
All of this data and the timing of it is recorded in the back-end, so in addition to providing better care, clinicians are safer knowing when something was put in place. The hospital has data in case there might be some sort of accusation down the road.
When you talk about procedures moving quickly and the goal is to avoid error, this sounds like technology would be really useful in emergency situations in countries dealing with crisis situations when there is so much going on around.
Definitely. In trauma situations, this is a technology that can support fast counting in a procedure that involves a lot of blood loss.
Why step out with this SurgiCount Promise and potentially make the company liable if something goes wrong?
We are putting our money where our mouth is. Instead of just providing a technology to a hospital, who then has a liability if there is a retained sponge – Stryker is saying we will share that risk with you.
We’re so confident in our technology, if used properly, we’re saying if there is a problem that is associated with SurgiCount, we will back you up financially. If there was a problem, we have a $5 million dollar limit, which could be used to refund money spent, contribute to legal assistance for up to 3 years – if the technology was what contributed to the problem.
How will cost shift for hospitals using a product like this versus your average sponges?
Generally speaking, it’s about 3 to 5 times the cost of a generic sponge. A hospital might spend 8 to 10 more dollars on a procedure. But, the number of sponges uses varies widely.
And you have to factor in potential malpractice costs if someone is left with a remaining sponge that then needs to be removed.
Absolutely. The average payout for removing a retained sponge is $600,000 – per incident. So implementing SurgiCount in a healthcare facility, if it prevents a retained sponge even once, represents a significant cost savings overall.
In a time when many people are questioning the integrity of major players in healthcare, especially the pharmaceutical market, it’s somewhat unexpected to have such an integrity-based model for Stryker.
It’s unprecedented. It’s actually raised eyebrows with other healthcare leaders that I’ve spoken to about it and generated a lot of interest.
It portrays the level of confidence that Stryker has in this technology. We have a lot of clinical evidence that shows why this technology works, and that’s why we are so confident.
Photo: Stryker
