OsteoCleanse Helps Hospitals Meet Regulatory Standards and Reduce Infection Rates
OsteoCleanse® May Reduce Infection Rates & Help Hospitals Meet Regulatory Standards
Concerned about patient safety? Confused about the regulatory requirements for storing and monitoring autograft tissue? With OsteoCleanse®Autograft Cleaning System, LifeNet Health effectively cleans, packages, labels and monitors the tissue, taking the burden off the hospital and creating a “worry-free system.”
Every year, more than 30,000 Americans have a cranial flap removed due to trauma, stroke, aneurysm, cancer, epilepsy or other condition. “These patients are already compromised due to the complexity of their injury or illness,” says Lindsay Reed, Associate Product Manager, Orthopedics, Joint and Trauma. “It is not optimal to further complicate their condition and risk their progress by replacing cranial flaps that have not been sterilized.”
OsteoCleanse creates a paradigm altering solution in the treatment of craniectomies. The replacement of native cranial bone for canioplasty procedures has long been considered the gold standard, but current methods of storing the patient’s tissue are fraught with possible complications. LifeNet Health’s innovative OsteoCleanse system offers a clinically effective, safe and biocompatible alternative to freezer storage, intra-abdominal placement and costly synthetic materials.
Many healthcare providers don’t realize that untested or potentially infected autologous tissue is required to be kept separate from other tissue and there are stringent guidelines on freezer temperatures. With the OsteoCleanse service, hospitals no longer need to accept the risk of storing, disinfecting and monitoring the autografts.
LifeNet Health participated in a pilot study to determine clinical outcomes using OsteoCleanse to salvage contaminated autografts for reimplantation. LifeNet Health and the Department of Neurosurgery at Virginia Commonwealth University published a poster with the conclusions of this pilot study at the Congress of Neurological Surgeons 2008 Annual Meeting. The study concludes that “tissue processing techniques can salvage contaminated autologous cranial flaps. These techniques may ultimately evolve into an alternative to storage in a bone freezer or to intra-abdominal placement.”
Redefining the Standard of Care
OsteoCleanse is a simple three-step solution for the treatment of cranial bone flaps. It blends the latest technological breakthroughs in the cleaning, disinfecting and irradiation of allograft and autologous tissues with the need to meet regulatory standards, and provides hospitals with a turnkey alternative in treating cranial bone flaps.
Step 1: Initiate Service
The process begins with the preparation and packaging of the graft during surgery to initiate pick up and shipping of the graft to LifeNet Health.
Step 2: Processing
Upon arrival at LifeNet Health, the graft is logged, cleaned and disinfected. Then it is packaged, labeled and irradiated. These steps are reviewed to ensure processing standards are met. The graft is then released to be shipped to the hospital or it can be placed in storage at LifeNet Health until the surgeon is ready to re-implant.
Step 3: Receiving and Implantation
When the graft is received from LifeNet Health, the hospital may choose to re-implant it or store it for a future date. A reputable courier services ships the grafts back to the hospital to further ensure a safe and effective re-implantation.