Health Point Capital: Medical Device Reprocessing Gaining Traction in Hospitals Nationwide

Health Point Capital: Medical Device Reprocessing Gaining Traction in Hospitals Nationwide (07/13/10):

Notably, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a comprehensive report in 2008 detailing the FDA’s supervision of the practice and outlining requirements for reporting any adverse effects. The report concluded that despite the limitations of current FDA data, the agency’s analysis “of reported device-related adverse events does not show that reprocessed SUDs present an elevated
health risk.”
Stemming from the GAO’s findings, as well as their own experiences in the OR, surgeons at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine published commentary in Academic Medicine in March calling for more hospitals to begin recycling disposable SUDs. Their report observes that the U.S. healthcare industry is the second-largest contributor to landfills after the food industry, with medical centers discarding over four billion pounds of waste annually each year.