Clinical Insight. Technical Execution.

Founder

Founded by a Surgeon.
Built for the Operating Room.

SmartCountOR was founded by John R. Dein, M.D., a cardiothoracic surgeon, inventor, and patent holder with decades of clinical practice in the operating room.

Following undergraduate studies and medical school at Duke University, Dr. Dein trained in General Surgery at Vanderbilt University and in Cardiothoracic Surgery including Heart and Heart-Lung transplantation, at Stanford University. He received a Cystic Fibrosis Foundation grant to take an additional year of training in congenital and cardiothoracic transplantation at the Harefield Hospital and the Brompton Hospital in London, UK. After two years teaching as attending cardiac surgeon at the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans, he moved to Sacramento, CA where he joined a busy private cardiac surgical practice; operating for 27 years and serving as president of the 5-man group in later years. After retirement from clinical surgery, he served as an expert reviewer for the California Medical Board and on the executive staff and advisory staff of two medical device startups. He is a listed inventor on 5 issued USPTO utility patents.

Dr. Dein observed firsthand that preventing retained foreign bodies by the archaic manual method of counting sponges, instruments and needles was mostly effective, but it depended on the human eye for counting, and manual recording making it an inherently error-prone, time-consuming process. The inefficiency markedly increased when miscounts occurred which required searching within the patient and room, multiple recounts and if the counts were not reconciled, x-rays were required which further added time and complexity to the patient's operation.

Over his long career, Dr. Dein witnessed many modern advances in the operating room making operations safer and more effective such as intraoperative imaging, anesthesia monitoring, drug improvements and safety procedural changes (e.g. adopting surgical checklists), but accounting for retained items lagged. He noted that the American College of Surgeons, the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN) and the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Hospitals all recommended that tracking technologies such as barcoding and RFI tagging be developed to assist in preventing retained surgical items. These are feasible approaches for accounting for sponges and instruments but are impractical for needles and sharp items.

Until now, there has been no advance in the accounting method for surgical needles which have remained the most miscounted item class. SmartCountOR reflects Dr. Dein's conviction that modern technology should be utilized to automatically and continuously account for surgical sharp items. Every design decision in the system traces back to his direct clinical experience with the counting process and its consequences.

SmartCountOR technology will improve patient and staff safety while also improving operating room and hospital efficiency, a rare combination.