SAFE AND EFFICIENT TRANSPORTATION OF MEDICAL TRAINING DEVICES: ANALYZING RISK AND COST FACTORS

Proper training for Central Venous Catheterization (CVC) procedures is vital for the thousands of residents trained within the month of July alone to avoid the 15% of 5 million patients who experience complications during surgery each year. The Dynamic Haptic Robotic Trainer (DHRT) system provides state-of-the-art training, supported to be more effective than other training methods in reducing mechanical error during CVC surgery. To ensure the DHRT system could be used in different hospitals in different locations, there is a need for safe and efficient transportation. Transportation modes have multiple aspects of cost and risk that need to be reduced. The inclusion of Expected Cost of Failure (ECF) into medical transportation cost analyses effectively accounts for these factors often overlooked in models by combining the probability and cost of different risk categories occurring. The principles of ECF were applied to a case study of transporting the DHRT simulator from State College to Los Angeles constrained by weight, time, and size variables. The strategy of analyzing this model considering 3 unique risk categories lead to a multiobjective optimization of limiting both transportation risks of delays and damage, while keeping cost at a minimum. In the case study, the risk costs generated by ECF supported the decision to transport via flight with a similar cost savings factor of 1.74 as the transportation cost of 2.45. However, in generated models of other variables, the inclusion of ECF altered the recommendation from the model. These results support the critical need to include principles of risk in transportation cost analyses and models, especially in the context of medical simulator devices and designs.