House Committee Hears from ASP on Improving Endoscopy Safety for Veterans

As a leading provider of knowledge and solutions for protecting patients against healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), ASP was one of only seven companies invited to address the House Veterans’ Affairs (VA) Subcommittee on Health at a recent roundtable meeting focused on HAIs, entitled “Innovative Private Sector Technologies to Improve Patient Safety.”

The goal of the meeting, which took place on October 25 in Washington, D.C., was for House members and VA administration leaders to learn about new and better ways to prevent HAIs among patients receiving care at VA facilities. With HAIs affecting 1 in every 20 hospital patients in the U.S.¹ — about 4,600 patients every day² —the need to take action to improve patient safety is urgent. ASP took this opportunity to show how its ground-breaking technology, the EVOTECH^® Endoscope Cleaner and Reprocessor (ECR), can help by eliminating human variability and inconsistencies in endoscope cleaning that may lead to endoscopy patient infections.

“The EVOTECH^® ECR automates the often error-prone manual cleaning steps in endoscope reprocessing to increase consistency, effectiveness and patient safety,” says ASP Clinical Education Director, Barbara Trattler, who represented ASP at the meeting. “In addition to reducing infection risks for patients, automation in the EVOTECH^® ECR also reduces injury risks for hospital staff and frees up their time to focus on patient needs.”

To help the House members and VA decision-makers justify the adoption of new technologies like the EVOTECH^® ECR, ASP provided clinical evidence of inconsistencies in manual endoscope cleaning practices at multiple healthcare facilities.

Barbara says, “ASP is committed to providing VA hospitals with the evidence, education and innovative solutions they need to raise the standards of healthcare for veterans and their families.”