Curiosity and continuous learning have always been two of Andres Beiras’ principles in life. He used to spend every day in the operating room and the lab, and today he is part of the team that develops the very same therapies and solutions that made his job as a cardiac surgeon and scientist possible.

When it launched 25 years ago, Getinge’s sterile supply management solution T-DOC was the first solution worldwide offering health care facilities to go from paper-based to fully digital surgical instrument traceability. Since then, Getinge continued to innovate the solution together with customers to meet the growing demands of digitalized health care.

When Getinge’s T-DOC was released in the market in 1996, it brought an easy, safe and time-saving way for health care staff to ensure complete traceability as well as optimizing instrument and device utilization. The instruments would be cleaned, disinfected and sterilized – delivered in time for each surgery.

“During the first installations the central sterile supply department (CSSD) staff were clapping hands. Gone were the days of tracking instruments with pen, paper and label applicators. They were so happy about going digital; saving time and thereby providing better patient care,” says Lars Søndergaard, Product Manager for parts of Getinge’s extensive portfolio of digital solutions.

Lars, who has always been into programming, likes to call T-DOC his little baby. A product that has grown into a market-leading solution in countries worldwide. In 2004, it became the first sterile supply management and surgical instrument traceability solution to offer multi-site setups, enabling hospital groups or regions to connect several hospitals in the same T-DOC system.

“These large projects with multi-sites and interfacing with the entire hospital’s IT infrastructure have become more and more common. It’s beneficial for hospitals to have systems that talk to each other. All our projects are carried out in close collaboration with the customers to create a tailor-made solution that answers their exact needs. Often, the needs turn into new cool product features that more can benefit from,” says Lars.

Although T-DOC has been consistently developed throughout the years, the core remains: that it is easy and efficient to use. Another time-saver added to T-DOC is the automation feature.

“Optimizing labor usage can be achieved in many ways, leveraging automation in the instrument reprocessing workflow is one of them. Automated solutions will save time when the manual handling at a given step is reduced. In addition you save time and reduce disruption,” explains Lars.