Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC)
MUSC is South Carolina’s largest Integrated Delivery Network (IDN), encompassing 20 hospitals plus nearly 750 clinical care locations.
About the Facility:
MUSC is South Carolina’s largest Integrated Delivery Network (IDN), encompassing 20 hospitals plus nearly 750 clinical care locations. MUSC is also the region’s only comprehensive academic health science center, training 3,000+ students each year. As the System Administrative Officer for MUSC Health Imaging, Ron McKee, and his team have been instrumental in bringing trophon® devices to all radiology departments across the system.
From soaking to trophon technology: workflow efficiency, improved asset utilization, improved patient care
Prior to implementing trophon devices, MUSC reprocessed their probes by soaking them.
“Soaking was a bit of a nightmare. It was challenging to meet the requirements from The Joint Commission with this manual method – requiring us to keep track of test strips, expiration dates, soaking times, etc. Another common issue we ran into was misplaced or out-of-commission probes. I’ve worked in both large and smaller hospital systems. In the larger hospitals, where ultrasound is used throughout the facility and many probes look similar, probes would get lost or returned to the wrong room after reprocessing in central sterile. This impacted our ability to scan patients. In the ER, we might have patients sitting at a table just waiting for a probe to be returned before they could be diagnosed. The smaller hospitals simply didn’t have the resources to get probes cleaned quickly enough.”Ron McKeeMBA, BSMI, RDMS, RVT, EMT l System Administrative Officer for MUSC Health, Imaging
When Ron and his team were introduced to the trophon device, he saw an opportunity to improve workflow efficiencies, patient care, and even financial efficiencies. “I’m an MBA/financial guy, so I think about the money and resources involved in each process. Realistically, trophon devices improved our space utilization at the hospital. We were building multiple special rooms for soaking. The fact that we could put the trophon device on a cart or shelf at point-of-care helped me eliminate the rooms used for soaking, and actually created more ultrasound rooms. This enables us to more efficiently serve more patients. Using trophon devices at point-of-care also mitigates the issue of probes getting lost between procedures. We tried the trophon device in one department, then ordered a half dozen more in a month.” MUSC began implementing trophon technology in 2018, and now has 37 units throughout their system.
The trophon® family includes trophon® EPR and trophon®2, which share the same core technology of ‘sonically activated’ hydrogen peroxide.
