Ascential (Stryker), an implant and delivery solution for lower acuity spinal procedures in the ambulatory surgery centre (ASC) and hospital settings, has been introduced at the 2016 North American Spine Society (NASS) annual meeting in Boston, USA.
According to a company release, Ascential offers a portfolio of newly designed sterile-packaged implants, customised service levels, and a streamlined distribution model. Ascential is intended to provide operational efficiencies, competitive pricing, and reduced operating costs, in order to allow staff to spend less time managing logistics and more time and resources on patient care.
Products available with Ascential include:
- The ACP 1 anterior cervical plating system.
- The IBD PeekC anterior cervical spacer system.
- The VBA Vitoss foam pack synthetic bone graft.
According to the release, Ascential is enabled with optional end-to-end radio-frequency identification (RFID) inventory management using proprietary technology. This is intended to allow sales representatives and facility staff to easily monitor and manage inventory pre-, post- and intra-operatively to help reduce labour costs and ensure implant availability. The implants are also sterile-packaged. All implant packaging is Unique Device Identification compliant and includes patient labels to promote traceability.
Unlike conventional inventory management methods, which generally require sales representatives to drop off equipment a few days prior to surgery, then come back to attend the surgery, and take the instruments back for reprocessing post-surgery, Ascential is intended to enable instruments to remain with the customer to be processed and sterilised on a schedule that makes sense for each facility.
This new inventory management program can be customised for each facility based on an analysis of the number of spine cases, surgical days, number of surgeons, and other variables and priorities.
