New recommendations developed from evidence-based research have been added to AORN’s Guideline for Care and Cleaning of Surgical Instruments. Several of these changes will have an impact on the quality of processing in sterile processing (SP) areas. This latest version, released on October 12, 2020, includes industry changes that have…

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Wasted room capacity is a major problem in hospital surgery departments. In most facilities, OR utilization hovers around 60%. Practically speaking, that means between one-quarter and one-third of expensive OR time is going to waste. Inefficiency at this scale is clearly a financial problem. As hospitals struggle to absorb volume…

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Editor's Note Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can detect COVID-19 by listening to patients’ coughs, regardless if they are symptomatic or not. To build the tool, the researchers solicited audio recordings of patients coughing and accompanying information about their…

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Editor's Note This study, led by researchers from Memorial Hermann Texas Medical Center, Houston, is the first to use hydrogen peroxide vapor (HPV) technology on a large scale to reprocess N95 masks in a healthcare system. The researchers were able to recapture and reprocess 29,706 N95 masks using HPV, with…

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Editor's Note Researchers from the University of Minnesota and M Health Fairview are using artificial intelligence (AI) to detect COVID-19 in chest x-rays of hospitalized patients. The researchers used 18,000 x-rays from COVID-19 patients and 100,000 x-rays from patients without the disease to develop and train an AI program to…

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Preventing infection transmission has been a chief concern of healthcare leaders and staff striving to protect their patients and themselves from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The virus poses an insidious threat that includes the possibility of bronchoscopy-associated transmission of COVID-19. Long before the pandemic, epidemiologist and researcher Cori…

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Results from the 2020 annual OR Manager Salary/Career Survey show that despite the turbulent times, most OR leaders view their work favorably; 77% are satisfied with their jobs, with nearly a third describing themselves as “completely satisfied.” This might seem surprising in light of COVID-19, but many nurse leaders are…

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Surveys this past year seem to have proliferated, many of them related to the COVID-19 pandemic. What has worked? What hasn’t? What are the next steps? Resuming surgical procedures after the springtime hiatus has helped regain some lost ground. Even as cases of the virus surged in many parts of…

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Imagine that during a total joint surgical procedure, debris comes out of a surgical instrument and lands directly inside a patient’s open wound. Although such a scenario is rare, when it does occur, it creates a major patient infection risk. Many standards and guidelines recommend best practices that can help…

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With more technologically advanced procedures being performed in ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs), it’s increasingly important to monitor data on supplies and manage physician preferences for particular implants. Physicians don’t always realize that reimbursement is lower for many procedures performed in an ASC than in hospitals, and therefore they may not…

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