The last hospital I worked at received over 150 loaner trays on any
given day. This meant we typically had to dedicate a single staff
member each shift to just wrapping trays. The ability to pull that
person to work on instrument assembly or other tasks while the
robot did the wrapping would be incredible.
Additionally, robots are already being used in some larger health-
care communities for tasks like transporting clean and dirty carts to
and from the OR. These robots can take clean case carts to the oper-
ating room, pick up the dirty ones and bring them to decontamination.
They even can take the elevator themselves!
Robots could be a huge move forward in consistency in sterile pro-
cessing. Think about it. Do you and your family members all per-
form cleaning tasks the same way? For areas where variability and
human error can result in improperly processed instruments — like
manual cleaning — robots could help to ensure a quality cleaned
instrument every time.
OSM
3 2 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • A P R I L 2 0 2 0
Mr. Marrs (bob@beyondclean.net) is the vice president of organizational devel-
opment at Beyond Clean, a sterile processing consulting firm based in Austin,
Texas.