COMTEX (Central Ohio Medical Textiles) Laundry located in Columbus, OH provides high quality, cost effective laundry and linen services to healthcare facilities in Ohio. COMTEX employs a comprehensive sterilization process to ensure textile quality meets hospitals’ standards.
Their sterile pack linen goes directly from the laundry to the operating room (O.R.). Anything that puts the sterility of linen at risk – such as holes, debris, tape, markings, lint or hair – immediately compromises the sterile field in an O.R. and can lead to cancellation of critical medical procedures.
According to Myles Noel, CEO of COMTEX, “You cannot jeopardize an entire service with one piece of lint. One sterile pack with a hair in it compromises a sterile field and greatly compromises the reliability and security of the [quality assurance] system. The world has become a very complex and dangerous place, particularly for at-risk patients."
Situation
To provide the highest level of quality and service possible to protect those at-risk patients, COMTEX was looking to supplement their quality assurance process to further eliminate risk of foreign debris on linen. “It’s a very intense and labor intensive process using lint rollers to remove [hair and lint],” said Noel. “The process is very detailed and while we’ve had very good results in this area, very good is not good enough.
