Introducing PenelopeCS™, RST's latest product that will revolutionize the way hospital's manage their inventory of surgical instruments.  PenelopeCS will help automate some key functions in the hospital's central sterile supply department (CSSD), where used/dirty surgical instruments are cleaned, sorted, inspected, and repacked into containers, to be sterilized for the next procedure. 

The concept behind the new machine is to apply RST's patented techniques for robotically handling, counting and inspecting surgical instruments to the basic sterile supply process of turning containers of dirty surgical instruments into clean, sterilized, and ready to use items. Click here to watch a short video introducing PenelopeCS.

Currently, the sterile supply process contains many labor intensive and time consuming manual steps, which may be error prone.  Errors in CSSD can result in a container of surgical instruments arriving in the OR with missing or defective instruments.  Understandably, this causes great consternation to the OR staff, and can result in frustrating delays of the surgery.  Click here to watch a video overview of the sterile supply process.

• Reduction of human error in the most critical parts of the CSSD process, by means of robotic and machine vision accuracy and reliability.
• Reduction in operating room delays due to missing, damaged, or improperly cleaned surgical instruments.
• Reduction in time to process instrument trays. Penelope CS can perform in less than five minutes what it takes a good technician about 30 minutes to accomplish.
• Inventory management and reporting functions hitherto unavailable to OR management.
• Eventual reduction in inventory of OR trays due to availability of reporting functions about tray and individual instrument usage.
• Alleviation of staffing shortages and reduction of need for constant retraining of new employees.
• CSSD staff can focus more time on harder to clean, higher-value instruments, such as laparoscopic instrumentation

PenelopeCS will assist CSSD staff in performing their duties more quickly, efficiently and with fewer errors.  It is expected that PenelopeCS will have a major impact on the way hospitals run the CSSD.  This is important not only for the health of surgical patients, but also for the financial health of the hospital, since the CSSD is major cost center for the hospital and supports the hospital's major revenue center, the OR.

In addition to the PenelopeCS robot itself, there will be an extensive line of semi-disposable molded plastic tray inserts.  These specialized inserts, which will be equipped with RFID tags and sensors to detect instruments, facilitate the function of the PenelopeCS robot in sorting and packing the instruments.