Editor’s Note The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), on December 31, 2020, posted in the Federal Register that it had extended its temporary final rule, “Prioritization and Allocation of Certain Scarce and Critical Health and Medical Resources for Domestic Use,” with changes, through June 30, 2021. The rule designates certain…

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Editor's Note The Kilmer Innovations in Packaging (KIIP) group seeks your feedback on sterile medical device packaging. This group is passionate about sterile packaging and its role in the delivery of sterile, safe-to-use medical devices. We invite you to take a brief survey for a chance to win a $50…

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Editor's Note In a November 23 letter to federal government leaders, the American College of Surgeons (ACS), American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA), and Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN) asked officials “to act collectively and quickly in support of hospitals and healthcare providers as they continue to struggle in response…

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Streaming music apps and access to music through smartphones and similar devices make it easy to provide many different genres of music and modalities that can ease surgical patients’ fears. The use of music in both pre- and postoperative settings has been extensively researched, but less is known about how…

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For the first time in its history, the annual OR Manager Conference was held virtually September 30 to October 2. Many things were different this year, but the robust educational content and advanced technology were the same as in previous years. In a post-conference survey, more than 60% of respondents…

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New recommendations developed from evidence-based research have been added to AORN’s Guideline for Care and Cleaning of Surgical Instruments. Several of these changes will have an impact on the quality of processing in sterile processing (SP) areas. This latest version, released on October 12, 2020, includes industry changes that have…

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Wasted room capacity is a major problem in hospital surgery departments. In most facilities, OR utilization hovers around 60%. Practically speaking, that means between one-quarter and one-third of expensive OR time is going to waste. Inefficiency at this scale is clearly a financial problem. As hospitals struggle to absorb volume…

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Editor's Note Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can detect COVID-19 by listening to patients’ coughs, regardless if they are symptomatic or not. To build the tool, the researchers solicited audio recordings of patients coughing and accompanying information about their…

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Editor's Note This study, led by researchers from Memorial Hermann Texas Medical Center, Houston, is the first to use hydrogen peroxide vapor (HPV) technology on a large scale to reprocess N95 masks in a healthcare system. The researchers were able to recapture and reprocess 29,706 N95 masks using HPV, with…

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Editor's Note Researchers from the University of Minnesota and M Health Fairview are using artificial intelligence (AI) to detect COVID-19 in chest x-rays of hospitalized patients. The researchers used 18,000 x-rays from COVID-19 patients and 100,000 x-rays from patients without the disease to develop and train an AI program to…

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