Components of some power tool sets used in the OR suites at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore were going missing — and it was costing the facility nearly $150,000 a year to replace them. Something had to be done to limit the losses and preserve the occasionally tenuous relationship between the ORs and central sterile processing (CSP). The hospital's leadership decided to implement a series of steps aimed at improving how the departments communicate and coordinate their handling of the costly tools.
In the first six months after changes were made, the bills for replacement parts plummeted to around $5,000. Two years later, the average annual cost of replacement parts was just $3,500. The process improvements they implemented to achieve those incredible results can serve as a blueprint for flowing instruments through your facility in ways that will save money and avoid unnecessary headaches.