SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Feb. 11, 2021 – Innovative Health, Inc. today announced that the top performing EP labs around the country have been awarded Innovative Health's 2020 reprocessing award for financial and environmental sustainability achievements in the EP lab. The awards celebrate hospitals that have reached high levels of success saving important financial resources in the EP lab by using reprocessed single-use devices. Several of the EP labs have reached savings of more than $1 million per year. Taken together, the 2020 honorees saved a total of $16.7 million through their EP reprocessing programs last year.
The importance of reprocessing programs in the grand scheme of healthcare sustainability was also underscored this past month by a newly released scientific study by Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety, and Energy Technology published in the journal Sustainability that revealed that the environmental impact of using a reprocessed EP catheter is about 50 percent of the environmental impact of using a new one.
"Robust reprocessing programs are more important than ever, both from a cost-savings standpoint and an environmental footprint standpoint," said Innovative Health CEO Rick Ferreira. "Particularly in light of the pandemic, such programs can deliver much-needed efficiencies to counterbalance recent losses elsewhere in the hospital system, while building a more sustainable supply chain for the future."
Innovative Health's 2020 reprocessing awards are being presented to the labs in January and February, at which time the company will be engaging these organizations to examine new ways to deepen savings in 2021 and beyond.
"The practice of throwing a device away after it has been used only once has come under attack during the pandemic: Hospitals have seen their supplies of critical devices depleted, and regulators as well as practitioners have endeavored to find new ways of re-using," said Sean Essex, Lean Manufacturing Engineer at Innovative Health. "Meanwhile, FDA-regulated single-use device reprocessing is an established circular economy methodology for doing exactly this: reusing devices to reduce environmental impact, reducing costs, and enhancing patient care. In many ways, hospitals should look to reprocessing as a template for how healthcare consumption practices can break with the single-use paradigm and realize this trifecta of benefits so eagerly sought for in healthcare."
About Innovative Health
Innovative Health is an advanced medical device reprocessing company that offers smarter utilization of medical devices in hospitals' cardiology and electrophysiology programs.
