Haldor Advanced Technologies Ltd. announced that its ORLocate, an RFID-based system designed to assist surgical teams reduce the number of items left in patients during operations, has earned clearance from the Food and Drug Administration.
ORLocate provides initial counts and item additions, the number of items not located, the number of clean and soiled sponges, and the time of the last count. The system designed to improve patient safety, decrease complex and time-consuming counting procedures that are prone to human error, and goes beyond counting spongers to include surgical instruments.
It works by each surgical item being tagged with a unique RFID tag, about the size of a small hearing aid battery. The tagged instruments and sponges are detected via antennas located throughout the sterile field and a robust software application that continuously and automatically performs the counting.
More than a third of all retained surgical items are instruments–52% sponges and 43% instruments–according to a 2007 study published in the Journal of Surgical Research. ![[end]](/resources/bullet/rfidnews-4.gif)
Sounds like a good idea