ClearCount Medical Solutions expects to place about 300 of its RFID-based SmartSponge Systems in hospital surgical suites by the end of this year and perhaps double that number during 2010, according to David Palmer, CEO of the Ross Township-based medical device startup, which was founded in 2004 by then Carnegie Mellon University students Steven Fleck and Gautam Ghandi. Now staffed at 20, the company expects to add up to 10 customer support, sales, and engineering staff after the summer.
Pursuing a sales cycle that lasts for almost a year, ClearCount launched the SmartSponge System this year and has placed it in one hospital while many more hospitals are in the process of evaluating it, Palmer says.
Those clinical evaluations should ramp up product placements by the end of 2009 and allow sales to grow steadily as the market accepts his company’s high-tech solution to an operating room procedure that is now managed by a hand count, Palmer says, often to the detriment of patients. As the New England Journal of Medicine has reported, surgical sponges are left inside the patient after approximately one of every 1,000 to 1,500 abdominal surgeries.
The SmartSponge system operates from a portable delivery bin in which every sponge arrives at and leaves the surgical suite and that actively communicates with a tiny RFID device in each sponge, constantly accounting for the locations of sponges and their return to the bin for removal after the procedure. “If a sponge is missing, there’s a special wand to use to scan the patient and assure that it has been removed,” Palmer says.
ClearCount is also developing a RFID-tracking system for surgical trays and instruments to expand its position in a market that exceeds $1 billion, he says. Listed recently by Wired Magazine as one of the top 10 good ideas for a use of radio-frequency identification tags, ClearCount’s technology introduces an element of active tracking that distinguishes it from bar-code solutions that other companies use to count surgical items before and after operations.
Source: ClearCount Medical Solutions, David Palmer
Writer: Joseph Plummer
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