Thanks to hundreds of donors at our 2017 ONE Night Gala, Regional One Health is introducing technology to the operating room that will improve our surgical procedures.

Efficiencies matter in operating rooms because time matters.  You can bleed to death in 20 seconds.

Regional One Health performs more than 9,000 surgeries a year in operating rooms (ORs) that are up to 20 years old.  Our older operating rooms do not have the enhancements and technology currently available that could allow our skilled surgical teams to be more effective in delivering care to our patients.

Currently, when a surgeon needs to examine a patient’s previous X-ray, he or she must exit the OR to view the image before scrubbing back in to continue a procedure. When patients are flown in from other facilities they often don’t come with printed X-rays. Instead, the original facility sends a disk with that patient’s images. When they arrive at Regional One Health the surgical team examines the images from the disk on a computer before entering the OR.

“It’s like looking at a picture and then recalling what it looked like as you try to fix the problem,” said Erin Price, nurse manager of Trauma OR.

It’s incredibly inefficient and it doesn’t have to be. There are solutions that improve outcomes, but until now Regional One Health was not able to afford these technologies.

Thanks to generous donors, seven out of 11 operating rooms will receive technology upgrades by the end of 2017.

The Stryker iSuite is a technology solution – an integrated monitor system – that allows surgical teams to focus more on patient care by maximizing the surgeon’s control of the OR. These planned technology enhancements will allow more efficient procedures—such as smaller incisions, shorter exposure to anesthesia and less blood loss—which in turn will allow the patient to recover faster and go home sooner.

The technology improvements will also enable more accurate procedures, allowing the surgeon to correctly place sutures, screws, rods or pins the first time.

“When you think of a CT scan, there are 30 to 100 different slices that you’re looking at.  So when a surgeon scrubs in and he can tell a nurse, ‘Go to slice 36,’ it’s a big change. Right now you can’t do that because it’s not in the OR,” says Erin.

With the new technology, anything in a patient’s record can be displayed on the new monitors in the operating rooms, giving the surgeon better control of their environment while streamlining procedures. The improved technology in the OR will go a long way in improving how Regional One Health trains future surgeons.

The upgraded technology in our operating rooms will raise our facilities to the level of world-class care our physicians and nurses provide on a daily basis to you and your loved ones.

Our patients, trauma surgeons and high-risk obstetricians deserve the best technology available to facilitate operations, maximize surgical results and optimize healing and health.

The operating room can be a scary place. For us it is also a sacred space, where a highly specialized team works together to bring about healing and health, where every necessary piece of equipment must be available to handle the unknown and create a positive outcome.

Our surgeons save lives every day. By supporting Regional One Health, our donors do too.

These OR upgrades are only possible because of the gifts made by donors at our 2017 ONE Night gala. To help expand the technology upgrades to other Regional One Health ORs, please make a contribution to Regional One Health Foundation.