S2S Design: Creating Innovative Solutions to HAI

In the spring of 2007, Jack Osborne and Thor Halseth decided that retirement was not all that great. You see, Halseth and Osborne were successful entrepreneurs. They had built a successful medical company that they helped take public. They followed that with another successful medical company that they sold to C.R. Bard. They enjoyed the challenge of identifying problems, developing solutions and bringing new products to market. In the spring of 2007, Halseth and Osborne decided it was time to get back to work and formed S2S Design, LLC.

The founding principles of S2S Design include:

• Identification and creation of innovative cost-effective solutions to current clinical problems.
• A sense of urgency to address the clinical issues, because what we do can affect people’s lives.
• Run a lean organization with limited overhead, so our focus can be on the clinical problems.
• Leverage the talents of industry people we have had the pleasure of knowing through the years.

Under the umbrella of these four principles, Halseth and Osborne decided to add two additional people, Robert Hall and David Seitelman. With the team in place, the hunt was on for clinical problems and the creation of solutions.

In 2007, S2S Design learned that restaurant style pagers were being utilized to cue patients in various areas of the hospital, such as emergency rooms and diagnostic laboratories, due to a concern for patient privacy because of HIPPA and the effort to make these facilities more User friendly. Unfortunately, these pagers were rarely cleaned and were contaminated with bacteria. Most institutions cannot guarantee that their visitors have washed their hands prior to their arrival in a clinical setting. To address this concern, we created PACOSrx™, a cost effective disposable pager cover that would ensure a clean pager is handed to every patient or visitor. The concept of PACOSrx is being extended into other areas of the hospital where clinicians need to ensure cleanliness. For example, portable telephone handsets or PDA’s when taken into an isolation room are covered to ensure that they are not contaminated when in that particular patient’s room. The cover is removed when the clinician leaves the room; just like isolation gowns are removed. This ensures no cross contamination with other patients or clinicians. A great feature of the PACOSrx is that it can be customized to include messages and graphics to encourage anything from repeat visits for the patient’s healthcare needs to suggestions for better health.

In the summer of 2008, two phrases were starting to cause fear and concern in hospitals across the United States: Pay for Performance (P4P) and Hospital Acquired Infections (HAI). How would these programs affect the bottom line?  How should we change our processes? While the clinicians had those thoughts, S2S Design decided to focus on the clinicians and in particular the Infection Control Specialist with these simple questions: Are there problems with any of the current products that you utilize?  Could we solve these problems to make your job easier?

During our research, the principals of S2S Design discovered a number of important facts:

Unlike the past, isolation patients and rooms are no longer relegated to specific sections of the hospital. This provides the hospital with a greater amount of flexibility. Almost any room can be converted into an isolation room for a specific patient depending on the needs of that patient.

When entering an isolation room a clinician needs to protect themselves by putting on an isolation gown and of course removing and disposing the gown upon leaving the room. The clinician may enter a room numerous times a day requiring the clinician to put on a clean gown each time. As the day wears on, many clinicians become tired and lackadaisical about securing or tying the gown. This results in the gown falling down the front of the clinician’s shirt or uniform thus exposing the patient to contamination. When the clinician travels to their next patient, regardless of whether the patient is in isolation or not, they expose that patient to whatever they may have picked up from the area they were in before.

The gown industry has attempted to create solutions to the problem of clinicians not tying gowns to keep them up. One such solution was to add tape tabs and Velcro to the gown, but this proved to be just as burdensome for the clinicians to use. Furthermore, hair could be caught and damaged in the tape or Velcro. Another attempt to solve the problem was the creation of a gown that goes over the head much like a bib. Unfortunately, this gown was awkward to use because it can be difficult to put on and take off as well as get caught in the clinician’s hair, eyeglasses and jewelry. The clinicians we interviewed made it clear to us that they were not pleased with the present solutions to the gown securement problem. Therefore we knew that our solution had to be intuitive for the end user, otherwise it would not be used properly and would be no better than what they were presently using.

As a result, S2S Design created Koala…The Gown that Hugs™. Koala gowns were developed to provide comfort, full-coverage and very importantly, passive ease of use while helping the clinician stay complaint in today’s healthcare environment. This passive technology means that by just simply donning the gown you are compliant: there is no tying, no sticky-tabs, no over-the-head securement, in other words, no second step to make it secure. The patent-pending collar closure “hugs” your neck comfortably, securing the gown and keeping it in place. The KOALA gown is manufactured to be cost competitive with existing gowns on the market today.

Koala…the gown that hugs™ is here! 

Koala will work with any gown style!
Koala can be manufactured from any gown material, so it will meet the different AAMI standards for fluid resistance.
Koala is passive so clinicians do not have to change the way they put on their isolation gowns.
Koala is intuitive so clinicians do not have to be educated on how to use it.
Most importantly, KOALA STAYS UP, even if the clinician fails to secure the gown!

S2S Design introduced KOALA at the 2009 APIC EDUCATIONAL CONFERENCE & INTERNATIONAL MEETING that was held June 7-9, 2009 in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. The response from the infection control practitioners was overwhelmingly positive. The infection control practitioners agreed that KOALA met their goals. During the months to come, S2S Design will be rolling KOALA out to hospitals and other clinical facilities.
 
For more information regarding the Koala and PACOSrx, please visit our web site at www.S2SDesign.com.