The Indian healthcare sector has made immense progress in terms of infrastructure, technology and healthcare delivery systems, but the occurrence of medical sponges and surgical equipment being left in a patient’s body is still a black mark on the system. A significant medical error like this can result in severe complications including infections and, in some cases, death. Global statistics show that a surgical sponge gets left inside a person in one out of 6,000 surgeries, although several cases go unreported and undiagnosed. This has become a major issue in India, with several deaths reported due to this problem.
Currently, the process for accounting the surgical sponges in India is manual counting. But this method is not error-free. Vital operations consume more time and require several surgical sponges, which means misplacing them in the patient's body is more likely. Solely depending on the OT staff’s diligence and experience is thus a big risk. So it is of utmost importance for healthcare providers to remain vigilant and take appropriate measures to eliminate the risk.
We successfully introduced India's first digitised and automated identification and tracking of surgical sponges at KIMS recently. This IoT-enabled method uses barcodes for unique identification of surgical sponges and packs before sterilisation, scanning in both packs and individual sponges before surgery into the software, and scanning out the sponges after the surgery.
The advantages of this innovative process include:
- Improving the overall safety of every patient who comes into the operation theatre
- Eliminating human errors
- Minimising the overall tenure of the surgery―it allows surgeons to close more quickly as they are not waiting on a manual count and recount
- Cost-effective solution―less than Rs 35,000 per operation theatre
- Easy implementation in Software as a Service (SaaS) model which can be easily rolled out to multiple OTs and smaller centres
In a scenario where healthcare providers are in a continuous quest for improving patient safety through innovative initiatives and technologies, such methods make healthcare safer, accessible, and reliable for all.
Venugopal is Group CIO, KIMSHEALTH