AITA™ Smart System
Ethicon, Inc.
Ethicon’s AITA™ Smart System is a comprehensive solution that optimizes the way hospitals manage their inventory—supporting sutures and a limited number of complementary products. It turns supplies into data, data into insights, and insights into actions. The solution consists of configurable hardware designs coupled with a cloud-based software application that powers the AITATM Insights Engine. The hardware includes the AITA™ Kiosk, which fully manages all planned surgical cases by integrating physician preference cards and surgical schedules; the AITA™ Mobile Hub, which is placed in the operating room (OR) for convenient, on-demand picking of add-on sutures; and the AITA™ Smart Shelf, which directs faster and more accurate picking and returns and manages safety stock inventory. Meanwhile, the AITA™ Gateway integrates data to showcase intuitive, customizable, and actionable insights to drive value.
Immediately after implementation within a hospital, AITA™ automates picking, returns, replenishment, expiry management, and order management for sutures, which helps to reduce labor costs, errors, and clinical burden. And as the AITA™ Insights Engine learns, its proprietary algorithms can see precision procedural details about the suture usage in order to make predictive suggestions to optimize the hospital’s portfolio. This approach minimizes long-tail inventory, saving time and allowing clinical staff to refocus their attention to the patient. Furthermore, the system supports product and procedure standardization by providing leadership with suture usage data that they can leverage in conversations within their teams.
The AITA™ Kiosk can pick 1,890 sutures per day. For a hospital that picks eight sutures per procedure, the Kiosk could pick up to 236 cases in a 24-hour period. That’s an annual savings up to $34,200 in labor costs and 900 hours of manual picking. The Kiosk is also able to return 320 sutures per day. For a hospital that wastes 18% of its picked sutures, that’s an annual savings up to $80,000 in eliminated suture waste, $15,600 in labor costs, and 650 hours of manual returning. That’s a total annual savings up to $80,000 in eliminated suture waste, $49,800 in labor costs that can be reallocated, and 1,550 hours of manual picking and returning. And that’s just the picking and returning feature!
When a hospital executive director was asked how he felt about the use of AITA™, he said: “What we initially saw with the potential with AITA is mining data. And what we’re seeing specifically in the suture environment is inventory reduction, reducing the amount of product codes that physicians are going to use. And the ones that we do use, [we’re] understanding what are the areas that we can use them more advantageously than we currently are.”
