Mobile Aspects has been awarded a patent for its iRIScope cabinet that uses RFID-enabled technology to prevent the spread of infection through flexible endoscopes, as well as tracking and timestamping an endoscope’s movements from storage to use to reprocessing and back into storage.
“Flexible endoscope reprocessing has become a prominent patient safety concern. Therefore, we developed iRIScope to prevent the spread of infections, standardize protocols, and provide reliable electronic documentation,” according to Suneil Mandava, President and CEO of Mobile Aspects.
Flexible endoscope reprocessing has been cited the last four years in the Top 10 Health Technology Hazards List published by the ECRI Institute. iRIScope meets this challenge by preventing and identifying cross-contamination to reduce the risk for proliferation and transmission of infectious diseases. If a protocol compliance breach occurs, an unused scope needs to be reprocessed, or a scope has been missing for 24 hours, alerts go off. With the Red Alert feature, the cabinet that houses the breached scope turns red, locks, and sends an alert to designated emails and/or smartphones.
How Does The iRIScope System Work?
Endoscopes are affixed with washable RFID tags and hung in the iRIScope cabinet. A user scans his/her ID badge and the patient barcode to open the now unlocked doors and pulls out a scope. The RFID sensors in the cabinet identify which scope was removed, while the software timestamps and electronically documents the scope’s removal, along with which procedure it is being used for and who took it. After the procedure is over the scope needs to be meticulously cleaned and reprocessed. The software timestamps and electronically documents each movement associated with the reprocessing. Once the entire reprocessing stage is finished, the scope’s usage cycle is complete and is again hung to dry in the iRIScope cabinet.
The system provides detailed electronic reporting at the individual scope- and user-levels. These reports are accessible in seconds, and are necessary to maintain good documentation, but are essential if there is a compliance breach or any inventory management issues like recalls or repairs.
“Since we’ve installed the iRIScope equipment, we have seen improvement in our overall accountability including: correlating scope to patient usage, high level disinfection process, tracking the efficacy of automatic endoscope reprocessor chemical, and our recent advancement in utilizing the iRIScope system to help track the last date when a scope was reprocessed.
“We have been able to streamline 300+ endoscopes through iRIScope asset management, and the equipment overall is a valued component of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania’s patient safety initiatives,” according to Claude Robert Gibson Jr. CST, Instrument Processing Manager at Penn’s Perelman SurgiCentre and Endoscopy Center.”
