Novel Methods of Ultrasound Disinfection

This edition is part of our Patient Safety Awareness Month campaign. We invite you to take a look at our free resources and learn more about our Patient Safety Begins With Me! initiative here.

Emmanuel Soto: This month, we're placing the focus on patient safety awareness.

While ultrasound is generally considered a safe modality, that doesn't mean that it's exempt from the risk of becoming a vector of infection. One important step in keeping your transducer safe for use is through proper disinfection. That’s why today, we'll be focusing on what methods are at your disposal and how effective they are.

Here to help us understand more about this important topic is Caroline Woodmansee. She is a clinical sales specialist at Parker Laboratories and has over 4 years of experience in the medical device industry.

What are some of the risk or issues that can happen if the probe isn't properly disinfected? If we don't follow low level versus HLD or if we just use a probe cover and skip a step, what are the risks there?

Caroline Woodmansee: If the probe has not been properly disinfected, the patient's going to be exposed to pathogens that might be left over on the probe.

I'll give you an example of a transvaginal scan being performed.

Let’s say, there's a patient who has HPV and you may not know that. If that probe is just being low level disinfected and not high level disinfected, that HPV, especially types 16 and 18, are not being killed by the LLD.

Then if that probe is used on the next patient, without undergoing HLD, it's contaminated and can expose the patient to pathogens.

Emmanuel Soto: What are some of the novel methods that are being developed?

Caroline Woodmansee: At Parker Laboratories, we have a new intermediate-level disinfectant called Tristel DUO and then a high-level disinfectant called Tristel ULT.

They both have a chlorine dioxide foam base.

Instead of the traditional soaking methods where the probe is being placed in the chemicals and staying there for 7 minutes plus, Tristel ULT is going to sit on the probe for only two minutes.

So, once you spread Tristel ULT on the probe, you're going to let it sit for two minutes. Then any residue left on the probe will be wiped off and that takes you through a whole high-level disinfection and reprocessing of the ultrasound probe without having to soak it.

Plus, there's no special ventilation that's needed and no capital equipment that has to be invested in. It's just the cost of the consumables when it comes to pricing, and that means HLD with Tristel ULT comes out to less than $3 per cycle.

As far as time goes, it's a two minute contact time and you can perform the steps from beginning to end in under three minutes. That signifies quicker turn around times for high volume clinics that aren't able to wait ten plus minutes to go on to the next patient.

And again, it's no costly upfront investment; it's just the cost of the consumables to go through that high-level disinfection.

It makes a huge difference.

We hope you enjoyed this excerpt of our interview with Caroline Woodmansee. Click here to watch the full video interview.