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New radio tag marks the spot for surgical patients
Ambulatory Surgery Reimbursement Update, November 23, 2004
The days of writing instructions or marking surgery spots on patients with ink may be coming to an end, with Friday's news that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a new device called the SurgiChip Tag Surgical Marker System.
According to the Scripps Howard News Service, the device is an electronic tag that uses radio frequency identification technlogy. The tag is imprinted with the patient's name and surgical site, then encoded with the surgery date, type of procedure to be performed and the surgeon's name. All the information is entered into the patient's hospital file and verified with the patient. The information is cross-checked and verified again the day of the procedure, and just before the patient is anesthetized for surgery, the adhesive tag is attached to the patient's body at the surgical site.
It's hoped that the new technology will drastically reduce the number of wrong-site surgeries performed each year. While hardly considered an epidemic problem, the Scripps article cited a 2003 report by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) that said the organization hears of five to eight new such incidents each month.
Dr. Bruce Waxman, the president of SurgiChip Inc., and designer of the new system, said that the new tag is not a sure-fire panacea, but that "If it is used consistently and properly it will significantly diminish the risk of site, procedure and patient errors."
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