Stryker Corp. in Kalamazoo, MI, has announced a risk-sharing program that protects investment in the company’s SurgiCount Safety-Sponge System with up to $5 million in product-liability indemnification and a rebate of the cost of implementing SurgiCount.
Retained surgical items continue to be the No. 1 reported surgical “never event,” and 69% of all retained surgical items are sponges, according to Stryker. An estimated 11 incidents of retained surgical sponges are reported every day in the United States, with an average annual cost of $2.4 billion to the healthcare system, the company says.
Several organizations, including The Joint Commission, the Associa-tion of periOperative Registered Nurses, and the American College of Surgeons, recommend the use of adjunct technology to supplement manual sponge counting to reduce the risk of retained sponges. The SurgiCounter is a scanning device that provides a real-time count in the OR. The SurgiCount Safety-Sponge System uses barcoding. The SurgiCounter displays the number of each type of Safety-Sponge that has been counted in, the number that has been counted out, and the remaining sponges to be accounted for.
Compared with the estimated $600,000 in malpractice risk associated with a retained surgical instrument, which contributes $94.50 to the cost of each surgery in the United States, SurgiCount costs $8 to $10 per procedure to implement, Stryker says.
Through the SurgiCount Promise, if a patient experiences a retained sponge during a surgery in which SurgiCount was used as directed, SurgiCount will pay up to $5 million in legal costs for the provider and refund the participating hospital’s incremental cost of implementing SurgiCount over its previous sponge spending for up to three years.
Nearly 170 million SurgiCount Safety Sponges have been used in more than 9 million procedures over the past five years, and Stryker says the system has never failed to identify a retained sponge. (For more information, see the story “Advice on resolving count discrepancies in the OR,” Same-Day Surgery, April 2016, at bit.ly/1PrXbxJ.)
