Medtronic has launched the Spine Essentials platform in the USA. This is a new platform of spinal implants and instruments designed to make the most common cervical spine fusion procedures more efficient and help hospital systems manage costs, while maintaining quality.
According to a company release, the goal of Spine Essentials is to help surgeons and their staffs streamline the most common spinal fusions, by providing the exact tools in the right quantities needed to perform one- and two-level cervical spinal fusions, while reducing the costs and time required for instrument sterilisation, case set up and inventory management.
Spine Essentials was developed in collaboration with surgeons and administrators, and launched at the Ambulatory Surgical Center Association (ASCA) annual meeting in Dallas, USA.
“As a surgeon who routinely performs these types of surgeries, it’s helpful to optimise the implants and tools, so we are being as efficient as possible to provide the best care possible to our patients,” says Richard NW Wohns, orthopaedic surgeon at neoSpine in Puyallup, USA and one of the physicians who collaborated with Medtronic to develop the platform.
To develop Spine Essentials, Medtronic partnered with healthcare systems across the USA to evaluate unmet needs and identify efficiencies. Spine Essentials implant sets include the most commonly used implant sizes for one- and two-level fusions of the neck (anterior cervical discectomy and fusions) and are sterile packaged with smaller instrument sets; intended to reduce the amount of inventory a hospital needs to sterilise, set up and store. This platform should reduce sterilisation costs associated with the procedure. According to the release, this includes:
- ~44% fewer instruments to sterilise compared with the full-sized configurations.
- 91% fewer items to sterilise compared with the full-sized instrument and implant sets.
- 67% reduction in number of cases to sterilise compared with the full-sized instrument and implant sets.
