Mr. Rowe believes this risk should be a top concern because numer-
ous patients could face an infection outbreak with a minimally invasive
surgical procedure that was actually designed to lessen the stress and
strain of surgery. Instead of providing safe, sterile instrumentation for
surgery, sterile processing departments who neglected the 24-hour incu-
bation period could unknowingly be cross contaminating patients and
causing life-threatening infections.
In light of this, Mr. Rowe's pick for a game-changing infection con-
trol innovation is the new technology that allows for rapid biological
indicator results in 30 minutes or less, a reduction of more than 23
hours of uncertainty. He argues this gives greater confidence in the
safety and security of a negative growth read out on a BI for laparo-
scopic instrumentation that needs to be turned over quickly for same-
day procedures. Sterile processing technicians can now have docu-
mentable results with a much more narrow window for potential
errors to occur. With a previous 24-hour BI failure, load recalls
involved large quantities of sets, numerous physicians notified and
ultimately multiple patients who could be put at risk.
As Mr. Rowe explains, with rapid-read BI results possible in under
30 minutes, ORs and sterile processing departments now can enact
strict compliance with regard to equipment manufacturers' instruc-
tions for use, such as running biological indicators on an every load
basis. Additionally, these quick results also reduce the number of
technician hands in the process, says Mr. Rowe, eliminating the need
for one technician to hand the process over to the next technician 2
shifts later. Advanced incubators that interface with instrument-track-
ing systems free technicians from manually entering the data into the
system.
4. Instrument visualization
4 6 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • J U N E 2 0 1 8
