Ashley Sonn, MBA
Director of Product Marketing
April 13, 2017
Fenway Park. The Freedom Trail. Boston Harbor. The Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN).
The first thing that comes to mind when you think about Boston isn’t necessarily AORN, but over 5,800 nurses recently convened for the AORN Global Surgical Conference & Expo at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center. AORN 2017 was the place to be for perioperative registered nurses and others who share a continuing commitment to quality care.
Connecting at AORN
Nurses, and the hospitals they represent, are constantly looking for ways to improve patient outcomes while also also reducing the cost of care. Both of these goals were addressed in some of the most talked-about educational sessions and posters presented during the conference. Cost containment and better clinical outcomes were also recurring themes among the 600 attendees who visited our booth and spoke with us about our perfusion, intraoperative neuromonitoring, autotransfusion, sterile processing, surgical assist, and minimally invasive surgical support services.
In addition to exhibiting, we hosted an educational networking dinner that featured a presentation on one of healthcare’s hottest topics—patient blood management (PBM). With the sun setting on the skyline of Boston in the background, our guests heard from Sherri Ozawa, RN, Clinical Director of The Institute for Patient Blood Management and Bloodless Medicine and Surgery at Englewood Hospital and Medical Center. Sherri, a founding member and executive director of the Society for the Advancement of Blood Management (SABM), discussed her experience creating one of the most widely known multidisciplinary patient blood management programs in the world.
Sherri Ozawa, RN
Sherri cited striking statistics from SABM that demonstrate the correlation between transfusion and increases in mortality, complications, infection, and length of stay. According to the American Medical Association and The Joint Commission, blood transfusion is one of the most overused medical interventions, costing the U.S. healthcare system $10 billion a year. Sherri and other experts agree that minimizing the use of transfusion in favor of a comprehensive, evidence-based patient blood management program can tremendously reduce this expense for hospitals and lead to improved outcomes for patients.
Nurses and organizations like AORN are often a major driving force behind performance improvement and patient safety, which made Sherri’s presentation on PBM a perfect fit for the OR leaders in attendance. We are grateful that she shared her time and expertise and we’d like to thank everyone who joined us for dinner and connected with us in Boston. Year after year, AORN’s annual meeting is fun, informative, and inspiring. It’s always a terrific opportunity to meet new colleagues who share our commitment to putting patients first by providing the best care possible. We were thrilled to be part of the 2017 conference and look forward to seeing everyone at next year’s event in New Orleans!
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