SPD is the service arm of the hospital, serving the OR and other critical departments in the health care facility. SPD is responsible for thorough decontamination, packaging, inspection, sterilization and transport to their customers in the OR, which include patients who trust their well being to staff processing the necessary equipment and devices .Just image the time and effort required to obtain the necessary instructions for processing.  Case Medical has partnered with OneSource to provide instant information about devices with a simple click of a button, using CaseTrak360 software.

Surgery is complex and risky of course. And, surgical  procedures have increased yearly many going to ambulatory surgery centers. In 2010, 48.3 million surgical and nonsurgical procedures were performed during 28.6 million ambulatory surgery visits to hospitals and ASCs combined. Growth in procedure-based work in neurosurgery is predicted to be 28% by 2020. The amount of procedure-based work in general surgery is expected to grow by 31% by 2020.

With the increased volume of cases and the variety of devices and the complex steps required to process these, one wonders how SPD functions with the added volume of cases and demands for increased productivity and turnaround. This can be  a very tedious process that frustrates staff, creates stress, and slows down the workflow.

Do your SPD techs get slowed down because they need to look up set information, IFUs and instructions in text books and reference guides?

CaseTrak360 solves this problem by bringing information about a set/item right to their computer screen. CaseTrak360 links instrumentation and devices back to an IFU or a listing on OneSource, which is natively integrated into CaseTrak360.

On November 25^th 2019 a prominent hospital in Indiana issued a press release. More than 1,000 of their patients between April and September of 2019 had been exposed to HIV, hepatitis C and hepatitis B due to an error in sterile processing.  A technician had missed a key step, in a multi-step processing procedure, for an instrument that left it contaminated with the blood of other patients. The hospital identified 1,182 people who were effected by this mistake and offered them free testing services to check them for the diseases.

Almost immediately a class action lawsuit was filed by the patients who claimed that even if they were not infected, they were still entitled to compensation from the emotional distress and trauma that the event caused them. The hospital’s reputation also took a nose dive and it is likely that it will lose millions of dollars in lost revenue, legal expenses, and settlements. All over one small mistake, for one instrument, by one person, in the basement of the hospital.

CaseTrak360 greatly reduces the risk of these events by providing step-by-step processing instructions for sterile processing technicians. The instructions can either come from IFUs that a facility already has or though CaseTrak360’s OneSource integration. Pictures of all sets/items are also available for reference and CaseTrak360 offers a built-in quality check so managers can verify that processing steps were completed properly.

CaseTrak360 also aids with infection response through its detailed reporting feature that tracks the procedures in which a set/item has been used, how it was processed, how it was stored, and all of the people that were involved in those processes. CaseTrak360 also tracks sets/items in real time, so they can be instantly pulled for scrutiny at any moment. With CaseTrak360, not only can infections be greatly reduced but a clear history and chain of accountability is established to stop it when it occurs.

On December 10^th 2019 Hackensack Meriden health, New Jersey’s largest hospital network, was attacked by hackers. The hackers seized control of vital computer systems, locked out applications, encrypted files, and brought the entire health network to its knees. Doctors and nurses couldn’t look up medical information to treat their patients, lab work couldn’t be completed, hundreds of surgeries had to be rescheduled, and everyone had to revert to a disorganized paper system to get things done. All of Hackensack Meriden’s facilities were affected; from small clinics to large acute care centers. They were forced to pay a ransom to the hackers to get full control of their systems again.

In analyzing the costs of the attack on Hackensack Meriden, one thing stands out as being particularly damaging. The attack caused 100s of surgeries to be delayed or canceled. Considering operating room time costs an average of $100 per minute, Hackensack Meriden likely host hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. However, they had no choice but to cancel the surgeries because their computer systems were down. OR managers couldn’t request sets/items for procedures, they couldn’t see their schedules on their computers, and they had no way of tracking where things were at their facilities.

CaseTrak360 would not have been affected if it was active in the Hackensack Meriden network at the time of the attack. The attack crippled the network’s locally hosted systems and CaseTrak360 is hosted in the cloud on Amazon Web Services. CaseTrak360 would not have even been visible to the hackers because the only way to connect to it is from a web browser as a remote client. CaseTrak360 does not use or require any local hosting resources from the networks that connect to it. Hacking CaseTrak360 directly is also unlikely as hackers would first have to breach Amazon’s servers, which is nearly impossible. CaseTrak360 itself is encrypted via SSL using 256-bit keys on both the server and client devices.

If Hackensack Meriden utilized CaseTrak360 they would still have been able to request sets/items for procedures, track sets/items throughout their facilities, and they would have been able to schedule procedures inside of CaseTrak360. It would have reduced the number of procedures that needed to be delayed or canceled and would have scaled down Hackensack Meriden’s losses.

CaseTrak360 is hosted on Amazon Web Services which offers tremendous benefits for CaseTrak360’s subscribers. The most obvious benefit is uptime: lots and lots of uptime. Amazon Web Services maintains a 99.95% uptime thanks to a massive, well distributed, multinational server network. This means that so long as a facility has the internet, they will have CaseTrak360. The software will never go down from a system failure and will be able to the maintain top-tier reliability that medical facilities need.

Another important benefit is that local system requirements can be very minimal. All of the thinking, logging, and processing happens in the cloud, so local machines only need to be able to run a capable web browser. CaseTrak360 has been tested successfully on Raspberry Pi’s, mobile devices, and budget Windows and Linux computers of all types and ages. CaseTrak360 is also flexible enough to run over a wireless network so no serious infrastructure upgrades are required to get CaseTrak360 running at a facility.

Lastly, it is important to mention the added security that comes from hosting CaseTrak360 in the cloud. In order to hack into CaseTrak360, hackers would first have to breach Amazon’s servers; which is a nearly impossible task. CaseTrak360 itself is also protected by SSL encryption using 256 bit keys on both the server and user devices which maintain military grade protection. If a network CaseTrak360 is running on is breached by hackers, CaseTrak360 will be unaffected because the hackers won’t even be able to see it at the facility. CaseTrak360 does not require any local network resources and the only way to access it is through a web browser as a remote client; so any local breach won’t even reveal that CaseTrak360 is even there.

Strong reliability. Ease of integration. Powerful security. CaseTrak360 can be counted on to work no matter what is happening around it.