Barcoding Sponges in Hospitals
Tracking Sponges May Improve Patient Safety
Attaching barcodes on sponges lowers counting errors.
New research indicates that using bar coding technology on sponges will make operations safer.
According to a study conducted at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, using barcoded surgical sponges during operative procedures increased the detection rate of miscounted and/or misplaced sponges. The research results were published in the April issue of the Annals of Surgery.
“Bar-code technology offers an easy way to help track sponges during an operation. This has the potential to improve patient safety by reducing the chance that the sponges will be miscounted and possibly left in a patient,” said Caprice Greenberg, MD, MPH. Greenberg is a surgeon at the Brigham and Women's Hospital Center for Surgery and Public Health and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Center for Outcomes and Policy Research.
Problems with Surgical Sponges
Surgical sponges are small patches of gauze used to absorb fluid. They are used during surgical operations and are sometimes accidentally left inside the patient (in this case, the sponge is called retained surgical sponge).
Previous studies have shown that counts are falsely reported as correct in the majority of cases of retained sponges and instruments. This causes the surgical team to believe that all the sponges are accounted for when sometimes they are not.
Tracking Sponges
Because of these problems, many different types of methods are being introduced to track the whereabouts of the sponges. Other than bar-coding technology, radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has been a main means of tagging sponges.
RFID systems are comprised of two basic components: a reader and tags which are applied to the items to be tracked. RFID tags are tiny microchips that act as transponders listening for a radio signal sent by transceivers, or RFID scanners. When a transponder RFID chip sewn onto the sponge receives a certain radio query, the sponge responds with a unique ID code back to the scanner. RFID tags are powered by the radio signal from the scanner. These broadcast signals are designed to be read between a few inches and several feet away, depending on the size and power driving the RFID tags.
According to ClearCount, the makers of the world's first FDA approved RFID sponge tracking system, every 120 minutes a retained foreign body occurs in the United States.
Benefits of Sponge Tracking
Greenberg and colleagues found that the bar-code system detected more counting errors than traditional counting methods both in cases where sponges were misplaced and counted incorrectly. Researchers also report that although the technology introduced new difficulties in the operating room, clinicians felt confident that the technology was effective and easy to use.
“The inadvertent leaving of sponges inside surgery patients is a rare but embarrassingly persistent error. It happens in at least 3,000 patients a year. Surgical teams have been seeking a solution to this problem for decades. And with this trial of computer-assisted method of counting surgical sponges, we have proof that we have likely found one," said Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, surgeon at Brigham women's Hospitalannd a co-author on the study.
