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The Economics of Prefilled Syringes - August 2017 - Outpatient Surgery Magazine

Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.

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ing the chance that someone will make a mistake," say researchers. • Reduced waste. There's less wasting of medications with prefilled syringes because they're measured out in their common dosage amounts. If a medication comes in a 10-mL vial and the doctor admin- isters 3 mL to the patient, you're wasting 7 mL (or at least you should be!). Because prefilled syringes come in the dose you most often need, there's little, if any, waste. • Compliance. The Joint Commission's National Patient Safety Goals stipulate that any drug that's drawn up in a syringe and not immediately administered must be labeled with the name of the drug, the concentration or amount and the expiration date if it's not going to be administered in the next 24 hours. Prefilled, pre-labeled syringes can help your facility comply with such rules while also saving time and labor. • Surgeon satisfaction. A doc who comes in one Thursday a month requests a ropivacaine pain ball for each of his cases. We kept 1 pain ball in inventory for him, but inevitably we'd run into trouble. Either he wouldn't show one month and the pain ball would expire, or he'd surprise us with 3 cases and we'd be out of stock. We considered training the nurse circulator to draw that medicine up on the sterile field in the OR, but that would have created a delay for the doctor. Instead we turned to our compounder. Each month, we order precise- ly the number of pain balls he'll need so we don't carry extras on the shelves and risk having them expire. We tell all of our docs that if they need something that we don't carry, give us 48 hours to order from our compounder and we'll have it here for you. If need be, we can arrange for overnight delivery. That $35 FedEx Express delivery fee is well worth it to please our surgeons. Overcoming sticker shock A U G U S T 2 0 1 7 • O U T PA T I E N TS U R G E R Y. N E T • 4 3

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