A Day in the Life of an ENT Resident
Endoscopy Insights
Dr. Wesley Stepp is a resident at the University of North Carolina’s Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery. UNC is a national leader in training the next generation of ear, nose and throat surgeons and Dr. Stepp brings an interesting perspective to this kind of work. Not just because his first exposure to otolaryngology was having sinus surgery in his teens, which proved life changing and set him on his eventual academic and professional course. But also because in his work today as a senior resident, he’s seen firsthand how single-use endoscopy technology has impacted his...
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Comparing Single-Use and Reusable Bronchoscopes for Interventional Pulmonology
Endoscopy Insights
The conventional wisdom in interventional pulmonology has long been that reusable bronchoscopes perform better than their single-use counterparts, but new research counters that thinking. A recent study, in Marseille, France, found that three of four single-use flexible bronchoscopes that were tested performed better in flexion and extension than reusable competitors. The latest single-use flexible bronchoscopes, according to the study’s authors, are a significant advancement over prior generations. One of those authors is Dr. Jonathan Kurman and he’s our guest on the latest episode of...
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Navigating Career Paths and Challenges in Flexible Endoscopy
Endoscopy Insights
Dr. Marybeth Spanarkel describes GI endoscopy as a labor of love. You can hear the passion in her voice when she talks about performing a procedure and the gratification that comes from getting an immediate medical answer to the clinical question that’s being asked. Spanarkel, however, suffered a career-ending neck injury after 28 years in private practice in North Carolina. Without full strength in her right arm, she lost the ability to perform endoscopy procedures and provide those much-needed answers to patients. That musculoskeletal injury brought her career to an end, but it was the...
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Right Pocket, Left Pocket: Achieving Buy-In for Single-Use
Endoscopy Insights
Healthcare staff shortages, while not new, have spawned a world today where it can take five hours to get an X-ray for a dislocated elbow and another two to get pain medication for the injury. Ambulances sometimes wait eight hours to drop off a patient, and nurses work 12- to 16-hour shifts, without a break. About 400,000 healthcare workers have left jobs since the start of the novel coronavirus pandemic, according to recent estimates from the Throughout the pandemic, hospitals have had to implement creative approaches to soften staffing shortages. Medical device companies have...
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Leading with Value to the Patient
Endoscopy Insights
Medical device suppliers and group purchasing organizations are teaming to bring new healthcare innovations such as single-use endoscopes to hospitals and health systems. By creating specific single-use endoscope categories for their members, these healthcare improvement companies can help accelerate the transition from reusable devices to disposable ones. But capitalizing on an opportunity to expand capacity and avoid costly and unnecessary expenses associated with workflow management and possible patient cross-contamination comes down to more than simply making a purchase. Rather, both sides...
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Calculating the Total Cost of Care
Endoscopy Insights
Transitioning from reusable to single-use endoscopes has obvious infection control benefits and even provides workflow and efficiency advantages — but the financial implications are usually one of the biggest hurdles to implementation. That’s why it’s important to explore all the variables that go into achieving cost savings with single-use devices and assessing that shift within the context of other healthcare paradigm shifts. In this conversation, four experts do exactly that by exploring the elements that go into calculating the total cost of care and better understanding what they...
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How Effective is Flexible Ureteroscope Reprocessing?
Endoscopy Insights
When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration released a letter to healthcare providers in April 2021 announcing its investigation into numerous medical device reports involving reprocessed urological endoscopes, Dr. Seth Bechis and his colleagues set out to learn more about reprocessing and its effectiveness. They focused on flexible ureteroscopes in their research and found that, while studies assessing the effectiveness of on these specific scopes is limited, their findings line up with recent news about other flexible endoscopes — that a surprising number still harbor protein and other...
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Becoming a Next-Gen Urologist
Endoscopy Insights
Matthew Katz was at Weill Cornell Medicine when a chance digital encounter ended up steering him into urology. “If you had asked me what a urologist did before medical school I probably wouldn’t have been able to answer the question,” he told me self-deprecatingly when we chatted at the . But a blast email to the entire medical school looking for people interested in robotics research caught Katz’s eye. His background in bioengineering had sparked an interest in doing something medically that was hands on, working with new technology and focusing on minimally invasive procedures. A...
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Mentoring and Empowering Women in Endoscopy, Part 2
Endoscopy Insights
Empowering women in endoscopy is something Dr. Arthi Sanjeevi is clearly passionate about. It shows in her work mentoring young gastroenterologists and in the way she tackles gender-related challenges in the field. In this conversation, Dr. Sanjeevi discusses what’s missing when it comes to empowering women in gastroenterology, and what still needs to be done to bring more female physicians into the practice, especially advanced therapeutic endoscopy. Sanjeevi is based in Tampa, Florida, with AdventHealth Medical Group and is double board certified in gastroenterology and internal medicine....
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Mentoring and Empowering Women in Endoscopy
Endoscopy Insights
Dr. Arthi Sanjeevi remembers a fellowship during her residency, when a mentor played a key role in helping guide her career path. Seeing her passion for therapeutic endoscopy — and her ability to perform the complex procedures — he gave Sanjeevi the push she needed. Dr. Sanjeevi does the same today for the residents she mentors. This is particularly important for female gastroenterologists, because studies show that even as female medical graduates outnumber males in every country except Japan and Switzerland, female gastroenterologist numbers remain stagnant. The nonprofit was launched...
info_outlineWhat are the challenges, and potential missteps, when it comes to reprocessing bronchoscopes, GI endoscopes and ureteroscopes? How have guidelines and standards evolved? And how has COVID-19 flipped the script when it comes to pursuing evidence-based strategies to eliminate infections related to endoscopes? We explore these questions and more with Dr. Hudson Garrett, CEO of Community Health Associates LLC in Atlanta and co-founder of the nonprofit Infection Prevention Institute.