Patent ID: 11894115
Assignee: STRYKER CORPORATION
Field: Medical technology (Instruments)
Classification: CPC G  A  Y | IPC A  G

Claim 8:
9. A sponge reconciliation system for maintaining records of sponges used during a procedure
to ensure proper removal of surgical sponges following the procedure, the sponge reconciliation system including:
a server;
a plurality of scanners, each of the plurality of scanners being adapted to read identifying data from a sponge; and each of the plurality of scanners including a scanner processor, a scanner memory, and a transceiver, and wherein each scanner processor is configured to:
generate a first article record identifying a first sponge scanned into a current procedure, wherein the first article record corresponds to a sponge that is to be considered partially reconciled;
generate a first procedure event record that identifies a current procedure, a user operating the scanner, and a patient with whom the current procedure is to be identified;
store data from the first article record on the scanner memory, wherein the scanner memory does not contain data that specifically identifies the patients with which the procedure event record and article event record is associated with;
transmit data from the first procedure event record and the first article record to the server;
download data from a second article record for a second sponge that has been partially reconciled to the scanner memory from the server, the downloaded data being from a prior procedure associated with the patient with which the scanner is currently associated for the current procedure;

wherein the server is configured to:
store data received from the first article record and the first procedure event record;
determine whether the first article event record received is a record indicating that the partially reconciled first sponge should now be considered scanned out; and
based on the step of determining, remove the first sponge from a file of partially reconciled articles.