“Inventory System And Methods Of Using The Same” in Patent Application Approval Process (USPTO 20200377300)

2020 DEC 22 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Hospital & Nursing Home Daily -- A patent application by the inventors Chila, Matthew (Doylestown, PA); Syby, Jonathan Addeo (Manasquan, NJ); On, Allen Keith (Flemington, NJ); Wade, David Mickle (Boca Raton, FL), filed on May 29, 2020, was made available online on December 3, 2020, according to news reporting originating from Washington, D.C., by NewsRx correspondents.

This patent application is assigned to Ethicon LLC (Somerville, New Jersey, United States).

The following quote was obtained by the news editors from the background information supplied by the inventors: “The present disclosure relates to dispensing and inventorying of medical products, and more particularly to systems to dispense medical products, re-stock medical products, and track and control an inventory of medical products in various medical locations, such as hospitals, clinics, out-patient surgical centers, or any other location that dispenses various medical products for use during medical procedures.

“In a typical hospital, many medical products are stored in a storage area, such as a closet or storage room. As one example, the storage and use of sutures is discussed. Typically, a hospital stores hundreds of different types of sutures on racks, in cabinets or in suture storage rooms. In this typical hospital, for any given surgical procedure, a surgeon will often have what is commonly referred to as a surgeon ‘preference card’ that specifies what products (including the types of sutures) the surgeon expects to use for that procedure, and how many of each. These sutures and supplies are obtained by the circulating nurse or other hospital staff and made available and ready to use in the surgical theater. It is common practice for any such preference card to include more sutures of a given type than what is likely to be needed, and additional types of sutures than those likely to be used to account for uncertainties during the procedure, and to avoid having to send someone to physically retrieve additional products from the storage area during surgery should the need arise.

“In current practice, surgeon preference cards are manually kept, and still often exist in physical card format as opposed to electronically. They are not updated regularly, and not updated each time a surgical procedure is performed to more accurately reflect what was actually used versus what was requested for that surgery. Thus, any errors and inefficiencies in supply are repeated over and over again for a given surgeon each time he/she performs surgery. Further, the hospital has no way of tracking these errors and inefficiencies at all, let alone relative to a particular surgeon. Preference card change management is not solely owned by the surgeon, nursing or materials management. Therefore, it leads to unsuccessful change management and remediation of surgeon preference cards. Service providers have built businesses on the remediation of surgeon preference cards, but their services are expensive and not done on a consistent basis. Procedural standardization of surgical products is a growing trend in healthcare to control costs.

“After a surgery is complete, all non-used sutures are to be properly restocked in their respective original storage bins and/or boxes in the storage closet. In reality, however, non-used sutures are often simply placed in a general overflow box in a storage room or thrown away. The job of restocking from a general overflow box (or otherwise) is a very time intensive process. For each individual suture package that must be restocked, the responsible individual must match the identifying information on that package with the identification on the proper box in the storage room. As indicated previously, these storage rooms may contain up to hundreds of similarly sized and shaped suture boxes. The current process is so manually intensive and time consuming, that some larger hospitals have resorted to hiring full time employees just to restock and manage sutures.

“This typical system leads to waste of sutures due to improper disposal or lack of restocking, and a higher incidence of product loss due to products passing their expiration dates. This typical system also does not track who is actually removing what type of suture or quantity of sutures from the storage closet, or if any unused sutures are actually ever restocked.

“Further, storage of sutures within a typical hospital leads to waste. Because hospitals typically do not have a system to accurately and timely keep track of inventory, often either too many sutures are stored-leading to waste due to expiration of those sutures, or too few sutures are stored-leading to use of alternative sutures which may not be optimal for the specific procedure.

“Also, restocking of inventory is a manual, time-consuming process, which typically includes a lag time of several days to account for shipping times, actual time for a person to manually restock, etc. Nurses and materials management staff usually split the responsibility of restocking surgical product. It is estimated that it takes hospital staff over 20 hours a week to manage and restock suture products in the hospital. In 2016, the Association of Perioperative Registered Nurses reported that the national average base compensation was $70,300. Therefore, it is estimated that it costs hospital employers over $35,000 to have their operating room nurses restock and manage their suture inventory.

“Although the examples discussed above refer to sutures, any medical product can be included in as these typical examples.

“Manual and automated dispensing machines are known and utilized for dispensing a wide variety of items ranging from snacks and hot meals to health-related items such as certain over-the-counter medications. The vast majority of these dispensing machines are vending machines that are utilized as point of sale devices. While dispensing and vending machines are utilized in many areas, they are not widely used in the health care market.

“In the field of surgery, for example, surgeons and other medical professionals rely on access to rooms of inventory having boxes of inventory manually stocked by themselves and sales representatives of the medical product manufacturers. These rooms require manual inventory control and simply hold the medical product.

“There is a need to develop an improved system for stocking the medical products manually. Typically, different stock keeping units, or SKUs, need to be segregated by attributes such as diameter of suture, length of suture, color of suture, suture material (non-absorbable and absorbable), needle type, etc. As one example, one surgical suture manufacturer, Ethicon, Inc. of Somerville, N.J., has thousands of suture SKUs for various surgical procedures and other medical needs. This could translate to thousands of different suture boxes on the shelves in a larger hospital supply room. Product identification on each of the boxes is relatively small, and must be read carefully to select the appropriate sutures listed on a surgeon preference card for a given procedure and must also be read carefully in order to restock unused sutures properly. Given the manual nature of the current process, there are significant efforts in selection and restocking and inventory tracking. As indicated previously, it is estimated that a typical medium sized hospital may lose tens of thousands of dollars per year due directly to inefficiencies in the system.

“As such, a need exists for better system for dispensing and restocking of sutures or other medical devices or supplies, and for otherwise more accurately and efficiently tracking inventory of such products.

“Embodiments of the present disclosure provide devices and methods that address the above clinical needs.”

In addition to the background information obtained for this patent application, NewsRx journalists also obtained the inventors’ summary information for this patent application: “The present disclosure is directed to systems and dispensing systems.

“The present disclosure is also directed to a system for managing inventory within a dispenser that is configured to maintain a known inventory and is configured to transmit inventory values from the dispenser so that other users can review the inventory values. Also, the dispenser is configured to be accessed by users locally and through an internet connection so that the inventory can be reviewed.”

The claims supplied by the inventors are:

“1. A dispenser, the dispenser comprising: a movable door, movable between an open position, and a closed position, when the movable door is in the open position, the dispenser is configured to receive a medical product into an interior space of the dispenser, wherein the medical product comprises an identifier; a holder in the interior space, the holder configured to store the medical product in a fixed location; a dispensing area configured to hold a medical product, wherein the dispenser further comprises an openable door extending over the dispensing area; a transport mechanism configured to move the medical product from the holder to the dispensing area, wherein the transport mechanism comprises a first reader configured to scan the identifier; a processor; and an electronic storage device, wherein the electronic storage device is configured to store a location of the holder within the dispenser, at least one of the first reader and a second reader, the second reader configured to read the identifier, being configured to read the identifier of the medical product upon insertion of the medical product into the dispenser, or configured to read the identifier of a container storing one or more medical products, and store a quantity of the medical product in the electronic storage device as an available inventory of medical product, and wherein the first reader is configured to read the identifier of the medical product upon removal of the medical product from the holder and transmit to the electronic storage device to subtract the removed medical product from the available inventory of the medical product.

“2. The dispenser of claim 1, wherein the dispenser comprises a plurality of medical products stored in a plurality of holders in the interior space, wherein each of the plurality of holders is configured to support each of the plurality of medical products in fixed locations, respectively, and wherein the electronic storage device is configured to store a location of each of the plurality of holders within the dispenser and associate each location of each of the plurality of holders with one of the plurality of medical products.

“3. The dispenser of claim 1, further comprising an error area, wherein the error area is configured to hold at least one medical product, wherein the dispenser further comprises an error door extending over the error area.

“4. The dispenser of claim 1, further comprising a restocking area.

“5. The dispenser of claim 4, wherein the restocking area is configured to move between a front of the dispenser and a back of the dispenser from a front of the dispenser to a back of the dispenser, and is configured to substantially align itself with a row of the plurality of holders.

“6. The dispenser of claim 4, wherein the first reader is configured to read the identifier of a restocked medical product in the restocking area.

“7. The dispenser of claim 6, wherein the dispenser is configured to identify the restocked medical product, and if the restocked medical product is the same as one of the plurality of stored medical products, the transport mechanism is configured to move the restocked medical product to the location of the one selected holder of the plurality of holders, and the dispenser is configured to add the restocked medical product to the available inventory of the medical product.

“8. The dispenser of claim 7, wherein the location of the one selected holder is selected by matching the identified restocked medical product to one of the plurality of stored medical products stored in the electronic storage device, assigning the selected holder to the associated location of the matched one of the plurality of stored medical products.

“9. The dispenser of claim 6, wherein the dispenser is configured to identify the restocked medical product, and if the restocked inventory is not the same as one of the plurality of stored medical products, the transport mechanism is configured move the restocked medical product to the error area.

“10. The dispenser of claim 1, further comprising a display configured to receive an input contact from a user, wherein the contact is used to receive a code, receive a selection for a video recording, display received video, receive signals from the electronic storage device, display data selected from the group consisting of a number of each of the plurality of medical products within the dispenser, a location of each of the plurality of holders, and which medical product of the plurality of medical products is stored in each of the plurality of holders.

“11. The dispenser of claim 1, further comprising a plurality of dispensing areas.

“12. The dispenser of claim 11, wherein for each of the plurality of dispensing areas the dispenser comprises a respective screen, wherein each of the respective screens is configured to receive signals from the electronic storage device and is configured to display dispensing area identifying information.

“13. The dispenser of claim 11, wherein for each of the plurality of dispensing areas, the dispenser comprises a respective button configured to receive a response, wherein the response is selected from the group consisting of an input force from a user, an input contact from the user, and/or an input of near physical contact within a predetermined proximity, wherein the dispenser is configured to transmit to a database that the response was received by the button.

“14. The dispenser of claim 13, wherein each of the buttons comprises a light source configured to illuminate in at least three different colors upon receipt of a signal, wherein one of the at least three different colors indicates that a pick list is complete, one of the at least three different colors indicates that a pick list is incomplete, and one of the at least three different colors indicating a pick list is complete but that at least one of the medical products in the dispensing area is different from the medical product of the pick list.

“15. The dispenser of claim 1, further comprising a first communication interface, the first communication interface configured to receive at least one of an available inventory request, a pick list and a recall request.

“16. The dispenser of claim 15, further comprising a second communication interface, wherein the second communication interface is configured to transmit the available inventory, in response to the available inventory request, to a database.

“17. The dispenser of claim 15, wherein the pick list is a list of one or more medical products of the plurality of medical products, wherein upon receipt of the pick list the dispenser determines the location of each holder of the one or more medical products of the list is associated with and the number of medical products on the list at each location, and then causes the transport mechanism to move to the location of each holder, successively secure each medical product of the pick list, and move each of the secured medical products to the dispensing area.

“18. The dispenser of claim 17, wherein the transport mechanism secures each medical product by contacting each medical product, and applies a negative pressure sufficient to maintain contact to each medical product.

“19. The dispenser of claim 15, wherein the recall request is a list of one or more medical products of the plurality of medical products, wherein upon receipt of the recall request the dispenser determines the location of each holder the one or more medical products of the list is associated with and the number of medical products on the list at each location, and then causes the transport mechanism to move to the location of each holder, successively secure each medical product of the recall list that is accessible, and move the secured medical product to the error area.

“20. The dispenser of claim 19, wherein the transport mechanism secures each medical product by contacting each medical product, and applies a negative pressure sufficient to maintain contact to each medical product.

“21. The dispenser of claim 6, further comprising a second communication interface, wherein the second communication interface is further configured to transmit, to a database, that an error is determined based on the identifier, wherein the error is selected from the group consisting of an identifier is unreadable, an identifier that indicates that the restocked medical product is recalled, an identifier that indicates that the restocked medical product does not correspond to any other medical product in the dispenser, and an identifier that indicates that the restocked medical product is expired.

“22. The dispenser of claim 21, wherein if the error is determined, the transport mechanism moves the restocked medical product to the error area.

“23. The dispenser of claim 1, wherein the transport mechanism comprises a stop mechanism, wherein the stop mechanism is at least one of a physical element that contacts an object and causes a driving motor of the transport mechanism to stop and a sensor that determines the location of the transport mechanism and causes the driving motor of the transport mechanism to stop once the transport mechanism reaches a predetermined position, wherein the physical element and the predetermined position are a predetermined distance from the medical product in the holder.

“24. The dispenser of claim 15, further comprising a plurality of transport mechanisms.

“25. The dispenser of claim 24, wherein the pick list is a list of one or more medical products of the plurality of medical products, wherein upon receipt of the pick list the dispenser determines the location of each holder of the one or more medical products of the list is associated with, which transport mechanism of the plurality of transport mechanisms is aligned with each holder and the number of medical products on the list at each location, and then causes one or more of the plurality of transport mechanisms to move to the location of each holder, successively secure each medical product of the pick list, and move each of the secured medical products to the dispensing area.”

URL and more information on this patent application, see: Chila, Matthew; Syby, Jonathan Addeo; On, Allen Keith; Wade, David Mickle. Inventory System And Methods Of Using The Same. Filed May 29, 2020 and posted December 3, 2020. Patent URL: http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220200377300%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20200377300&RS=DN/20200377300

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