Israel launches first ‘Smart Operating Room’
The Galilee Medical Center in the northern Israeli city of Nahariya this week announced launching a “smart room” for managing operating room inventory.
Launched by the company Autonomi in cooperation with SAREL: Logistics Solutions & Products for Advanced Medicine Ltd., the smart room will focus on inventory management and optimization in the operating room.
“After years of developing systems for managing prescription drug inventory for the American market, we moved to the next level and expanded the system to manage medical equipment inventory in medical institutions in general and operating rooms in particular,” said Autonomi CEO Yoav Kestel, at the opening of the Galilee Medical Center smart room.
Autonomi claims the system could lead to annual savings of up to 15% of the cost of drugs and medical equipment.
The “smart room” technology is designed to independently track supplies assigned to a medical team or individual medical cases. The system tracks inventory automatically and can reorder needed supplies, conduct patient-safety recalls or warn about upcoming expiration dates, all without direct human intervention.
Hospital inventory management is very complex and requires numerous man-hours to manage and track all the organization’s resources properly. Improper management can lead to losses, such as leading to drugs or equipment expiring before use the postponement of medical procedures if the right tools or implants are absent.
Smart operating rooms are one of the latest developments in medical care and are expected to revolutionize how operating rooms function. In the United States, the term often refers to the integration of digital tools to streamline various tasks being performed in the surgical arena.
Companies like Omnimed, ERD and ETKHO offer solutions to integrate real-time surgical imaging with tool and implant tracking during surgical procedures. Autonomi’s solution, by contrast, focuses solely on inventory management.
According to a competing company, IDENTI, between 40% to 60% of hospital supply budgets go toward operating room inventory and $2.5 million is lost on inventory wastage in the U.S. per year.
The All Israel News Staff is a team of journalists in Israel.
