Measuring intraoperative surgical instrument use with radio-frequency identification

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Health Informatics
• Surgical Technology

Background:

• Surgical instrument oversupply leads to increased costs, confusion, and workload in operating rooms, with 78%-87% of instruments often unused.
• Previous manual methods for instrument use analysis are qualitative, costly, unsustainable, and prone to human error.
• There is a critical need for automated, scalable, and accurate systems to measure surgical instrument utilization.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and evaluate an automated system for measuring surgical instrument use in real-time.
• To compare the accuracy of the automated system against manual tracking methods.
• To assess the impact of the automated system on surgical supply reduction and efficiency.

Main Methods:

• Development of a novel radio-frequency identification (RFID) system for automated, real-time collection of surgical instrument use data.
• Tracking instrument usage across 15 breast surgeries, 10 carpometacarpal (CMC) arthroplasties, and 4 craniotomies.
• Comparison of RFID system data with manual recordings by a trained observer.

Main Results:

• The RFID system demonstrated near-perfect agreement (Cohen's Kappa = 0.81) with manual observer data.
• The system facilitated an average supply reduction of 50.8% in breast and orthopedic surgeries.
• Reduced instrument trays in monitored surgeries led to no requests for eliminated instruments and decreased setup time in breast surgery from 23 to 17 minutes.

Conclusions:

• The developed RFID system provides a novel, accurate data stream for effective surgical instrument supply optimization.
• Automated tracking offers a scalable and sustainable solution for refining surgical instrument inventory.
• This technology has the potential to significantly reduce costs and improve operating room workflow.