Outpatient Surgery Magazine - Subscribers

OR Excellence 2019 Awards - Outpatient Surgery Magazine - September 2019

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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expired suture without investigating whether the ASC's 18 surgeons were still using that particular suture, or if there were more boxes already in stock. The ASC was routinely stocking 145 different types of suture. Ms. Heckmaster set out to untangle the suture mess by decreasing suture inventory to a more reasonable and realistic level, storing all suture on one suture cart in one location, establishing a PAR (Periodic Automatic Replenishment) level inventory system based on usage levels and educating staff on first-in, first-out (FIFO). Thinning the herd The first step was evaluating the suture inventory. Ms. Heckmaster created a master suture list that itemized all the types of suture in stock, the names of the surgeons who used each type of suture and what the PAR levels should be. She referenced surgeon preference cards to determine what suture the surgeons used on each case. "Suture not found on any preference cards was automatically removed from our stock," says Ms. Heckmaster, adding that they con- solidated multiple types of the same suture into one and then updated the preference cards to reflect the change. They removed 27 types of suture from the 145 that they stocked, an 18% reduction, but that was just the tip of the iceberg because there were multiple boxes of each of the 145 different suture types in the inventory, ranging from 2-6 boxes each, says Ms. Heckmaster. To recov- er some of the financial loss, AdventHealth Surgery Center Lenexa returned for credit any recently purchased unopened boxes. They sold or exchanged within its hospital system any unopened suture boxes they couldn't return. With multiple boxes of the same suture already opened, they labeled the boxes in order, based on expiration date, to notify staff from which boxes to pull. S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 9 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y. N E T • 6 7

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