Bone products in surgery: a blueprint for standardization

Surgical facilities often stock many types of bone and bone products to meet the needs of multiple surgeons. In this era of cost containment, product standardization is necessary for the financial well-being of health care facilities. By familiarizing themselves with bone and bone product harvesting and processing and the US Food and Drug Administration requirements for approval of these products, perioperative nurses and managers can more easily standardize the bone and tissue products stocked and reduce costs. Steps toward standardization include establishing a multidisciplinary surgical product use committee to evaluate products used in the OR, limiting the number of tissue vendors for the facility to as few as possible, completing a product inventory to identify what is currently available, and constructing charts to share with surgeons that provide the rationales for standardizing products.