Total Trace - a new modular system for tracking surgical assets

The system was developed in the light of the increasing pressures on Sterile Services Departments ( SSD ) and Theatre Sterile Supply Units ( TSSUs ) to do more with less. UK Government and EC legislation and pressure from NHS Trusts to meet “star” targets mean that SSDs have to meet constantly rising standards without corresponding increases in resources.

Designed specifically for Sterile Services applications, Total Trace eliminates paper-based systems for tracking surgical assets throughout their life-cycle. Total Trace has been developed with the help of Sterile Services managers to ensure that the system delivers the controls and processes needed to manage surgical assets.

The benefits over paper systems are clear. Managers have more control over inventory and work-in-progress, supervisors can prioritise and manage workflow through the SSD and operators can trade in pens for bar-code readers.

Featuring bar-code scanning technology with flexible configuration options such as Trauma / Theatre / General flow prioritisation, Total Trace combines intelligent tracking with accurate traceability of all instruments. Bar-code scanners can be replaced by any media readers such as RFID with ease when the tagging technology is ready.

Following the recent Patients Association report, we are pleased to announce that Total Trace has been built to manage individual instrument tracking when a robust solution to marking devices is available.

Product Manager Del Attah reflects “Industry on the whole has a number of weapons in the armoury to tag almost every single unit sold, but as yet, the manufacturers of surgical instruments have not met the challenge of a cost-effective tagging regime that can cope with the extreme environmental conditions in a Sterile Services Department. The challenge extends to making sure that tags last as long as the instruments. RFID tagging looks promising, but the benefits of RFID are greatest when you can read a whole pallet load in one pass, but current generation tags suitable for high temperatures demand proximity to a reader.”

Total Trace, developed and supported in the UK by Zeraxis Ltd, offers an affordable management solution for the tracing and tracking of surgical assets during the sterile supply cycle. Total Trace is a fast, reliable and easy to use. Total Trace is a modular system, so that tracking can be integrated to existing internal systems, or the Inventory, Costing and Billing modules can be supplied as well.

Surgical instrument tracking is high on the Health Agenda at the present time. The Patient's Association has issued a report calling for NHS Trusts to track individual surgical instruments.

Within hospitals Sterile Service Departments ( SSDs ) ( also referred to as Theatre Sterile Supply Units - TSSUs ) have to sterilize used surgical instruments, often under very tight deadlines. Some diseases, notably Creutzfelts Jacobs Disease ( “Mad Cow disease” ) require that surgical instruments, once they have been contaminated with infected material from a CJD patient, cannot be used on another patient and must be destroyed.

If the hospital does not know that a patient is infected at the time of surgery, it is necessary to trace not only which patients the infected instruments were subsequently used on, but also to find out which instruments the infected set were cleaned with.

Many hospitals still do this using a paper-based system. Computerised systems are typically expensive and are difficult to install. Total Trace believe that we have broken that mould.

As well as being under pressure to raise standards, SSDs are also under financial pressure and many units suffer high staff turnover. Long or un-social hours and work that is not for the squeamish are contributory factors. The low wages can also attract under-trained staff, often with poor language skills. A computerised system can mitigate the effects of inexperienced staff by enforcing rigorous checking and audit trails, and keeping supervisors appraised of exceptional conditions, such as a recall from the manufacturers.

It is presently difficult to “tag” individual surgical instruments, as instrument sized labels do not survive long because of the sterilisation process, and etching will invalidate warranties on many instruments, and all are potential hiding places for infection.

RFID-tagging ( Radio Frequency Identification tagging ) is in theory an ideal solution for tagging individual instruments. In an industrial environment, a whole pallet of goods can be “read” in one pass through an RFID-reader, but for surgical instruments, costs are presently very high, and the tags that would survive the temperatures in a SSD would have to pass very close to an RFID-reader.

Thus the call for individual instrument tracking is some way from becoming reality for all SSDs. Total Trace has been built to cater for either tray level tracking or instrument level tracking, so it is ready for the future.

Total Trace
Penshurst Place
90-92 Southbridge Road
Croydon CR0 1AF
United Kingdom
Media enquiries: Adrian Young +44-208-253-4451, +44-7971-280851

Published on:
2005-03-22

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