Spine Essentials
May 19, 2016
Medtronic Announces U.S. Launch of Spine Essentials Demonstrating Its Commitment to Create Value in Healthcare
New Platform Increases Efficiencies and Reduces Costs Associated with Common Spinal Surgery
Medtronic plc (NYSE: MDT) announced the U.S. launch of Spine Essentials(TM), a new platform of spinal implants and instruments designed to make the most common cervical spine fusion procedures more efficient and help hospital systems manage costs, while maintaining quality.
The goal of Spine Essentials is to help surgeons and their staffs streamline the most common spinal fusions, by providing the exact tools in the right quantities needed to perform 1- and 2-level cervical spinal fusions, while reducing the costs and time required for instrument sterilization, case set up and inventory management.
Spine Essentials was developed in collaboration with leading surgeons and administrators and launched today at the Ambulatory Surgical Center Association (ASCA) annual meeting in Dallas.
"As a surgeon who routinely performs these types of surgeries, it's helpful to optimize the implants and tools, so we're being as efficient as possible to provide the best care possible to our patients," said Dr. Richard N.W. Wohns, neurosurgeon at neoSpine in Puyallup, WA and one of the physicians who collaborated with Medtronic to develop the platform.
To develop Spine Essentials, Medtronic partnered with healthcare systems across the U.S. to evaluate unmet needs and identify efficiencies. Spine Essentials implant sets include the most commonly used implant sizes for 1- and 2-level fusions of the neck (anterior cervical discectomy and fusions) and are sterile packaged with smaller instrument sets; thereby reducing the amount of inventory a hospital needs to sterilize, set up and store. This platform will reduce sterilization costs associated with the procedure, including:
- ~ 44% fewer instruments to sterilize compared with the full-sized configurations.
- 91% fewer items to sterilize compared with the full-sized instrument and implant sets.
- 67% reduction in number of cases to sterilize compared with the full-sized instrument and implant sets.
"Healthcare systems are under intense economic challenges, and Spine Essentials is an example of how Medtronic can bring value to spine surgery by optimizing costs and efficiency," said Doug King, senior vice president and president of Medtronic's Spinal business, which is part of the Restorative Therapies Group at Medtronic. "We're committed to delivering successful patient outcomes more efficiently, but we can't do it alone which is why Spine Essentials was developed with the input of physicians and hospitals."
This product incorporates technology developed by Gary K. Michelson, M.D.
