The Waste Watcher System

Helping Manage Critical Infectious Waste Issues

The Waste Watcher System was designed with the needs of hospitals and medical facilities in mind. Infectious regulated waste is a major headache to medical staff who must deal with its issues on a daily basis. The Waste Watcher is designed to help in the management of these issues. With the Waste Watcher in place, environmental support personnel in both management and operational roles are relieved from the burden of manually tracking and reporting on infectious waste issues such as volume produced, treated onsite and shipped offsite, length of radio-active decay detention, and noncompliance or violation issues. In addition to easing the burden of manually entering infectious waste records, the Waste Watcher also reduces the risks of improperly recorded information that can result from hand-written records.

In order to track and report on infectious waste, the Waste Watcher uses a bar-code based tracking system that can be granularized to the individual needs of a facility. The Waste Watcher is designed to track from the "bulk waste load" level, typically in large carts, down to the individual waste disposal unit level, typical a waste basket. This granularity allows the Waste Watcher to work most effectively within the confines of current disposal methods. When tracking waste on a unit, floor or finer level, the Waste Watcher reporting software gives you a simple way to "bill back" individual departments for waste removal charges and can help to identify "problem" areas of your facility that may be using improper disposal methods and are generating unnecessary regulated waste. With a finer level of granularity, you will be able to track waste being generated by a given patient room or even by an individual patient. Key Value Indicators can be tied into this information in an additional module that allows simplified reporting of department performance based on patient and procedure loads.

What does all of this mean to you and your medical facility? This means that you can reduce the cost of disposing of expensive regulated or "red bag" waste by putting non-regulated waste in its proper place. You can reduce the labor necessary to track regulated medical waste and thereby reduce man-hours and improve data reliability. You will also know the exact amount of waste being removed and can audit waste removal charges. You can also reduce the risks associated with improper disposal methods by allowing your disposal operators to track non-compliance issues through the Waste Watcher and thereby tracking "hazardous areas" where waste is routinely being treated improperly - before it is caught in an audit or worse. What this all means is a lower overall cost to your medical center through reduced disposal costs, reduced labor costs and reduced risks, fines and penalties.