By Jennifer Zaino

June 9, 2008—Hernias are painful—and not just for patients. With more than 750,000 hernia operations performed annually in the United States, hospitals must stock a large number of hernia mesh patches in various models, sizes and styles. In most facilities, the inventory and expiration dates of these implants are tracked manually, which can result in costly errors and lost revenue.

Nurses often pull multiple hernia meshes from a surgical cart to ensure that a doctor has the correct size on hand in the operating room (OR). It's common for busy nurses to forget to return unused patches to the cart after a procedure's completion. Equally problematic, hospitals lack visibility into the expiration dates of such products, so they may not discover a product is no longer viable until it's too late to return it to the manufacturer for credit. What's more, due to glitches in how data about hernia meshes is manually entered into an OR log, patients may not be charged for items used during their surgeries, or they could be charged for a different item.

In 2007, Integris launched a four-month pilot to track hernia meshes at its Southwest Medical Center acute care facility in Oklahoma City.

At Integris Health, the largest health-care provider in Oklahoma, Jerome R. Gardner, VP of special projects and consulting services, saw an opportunity to employ RFID technology to revamp how the organization tracks hernia meshes, thereby reducing the likelihood of expired and missing products, and bringing a hard-dollar return on investment.