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Bar Codes Keep Surgical Objects Outside Patients
Reservoir Hill writes "Every year about 1,500 people in the US have surgical objects accidentally left inside them after surgery, according to medical studies. To prevent this potentially deadly problem, Loyola University Medical Center is utilizing a new technology that is helping its surgical teams keep track of all sponges used during a surgical procedure. Each sponge has a unique bar code affixed to it that is scanned by a high-tech device to obtain a count. Before a procedure begins, the identification number of the patient and the badge of the surgical team member maintaining the count are scanned into the counter. When a sponge is removed from a patient, it is scanned back into the system. A surgical procedure cannot end until all sponges are accounted for."
Well then, those specialist surgeons can peel off maybe ten of the thousands of dollars they're making per hour in that operating room to hire a semi-literate guy to watch the operation on closed-circuit TV and count sponges going in and out of the patient.
But I guess until I have a couple decades' vested interest in the status quo I'm not allowed to criticize, right?
Actually, I'd say the flaming started a little earlier...if I understand the term properly. And several of my friends in the medical community were entirely unsurprised by the stats. One of them noted that people are notoriously hard to kill, and an awful lot of them have probably survived a whole lot more mistakes. Another is a nurse, and she provided quite a bit of anecdotal evidence to flesh out the numbers.
It might actually be interesting if we could add up the number of interactions between any person and any illegal drug, and the number of interactions between patients and doctors, and see what the totals might be. Perhaps you'd like to go back to school yourself and find out?
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
When it comes to medicine and surgical operations, we expect a level of perfection beyond the level we consider needed for computer software and hardware (except for that used for direct medical care). And I believe your counting method for surgical sponges just doesn't fly well enough. That is because these mistakes still happen with so many hospitals using such a procedure. Bar code scanning I believe would not be any better. Either way, someone could enter the operation process with a failure to be counted or scanned. Then you can do all the post-operation checks, and something could still be left behind. At least with the RFID, the patient can be scanned to see if anything responds, and it would identify what it is. You would then just need to do the RFID scan on things going into the procedure if for nothing else but to be sure the RFID chip is functional (if it fails in pre-scan, discard it and get another).
You might be more qualified in medicine. But this is not a true medical issue. This is an issue of logistics that happens to be connected to medicine in a very crucial way. If you medical guys can't get it solved on your own (and you have not done so, yet, because this is an area where the goal of zero errors is more than just the direction to aim, it is the destination that must be reached), then maybe we do need to step in and solve it for you. Things like RFID do look promising. IMHO, any hospital with a history of having left anything in any patient in the past 5 years should be required to do an X-ray and/or other appropriate scan of every patient to check for leftovers at no cost to the patient.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars