Years at the sink taught me what no dashboard could.
In 2009 I took a job as a sterile processing technician in Cincinnati. I've spent years at the sink and the assembly table, in the part of healthcare most people never see — the room where instruments come back dirty and have to leave safe.
What I learned there stuck with me: the hardest part of reprocessing isn't knowing where an instrument is. It's knowing what to do the moment something goes wrong — and being able to prove, later, that you did it right.
Good decisions were being made, and then vanishing.
I watched skilled technicians make the right call on a wet pack, a failed indicator, a questionable load — and I watched those decisions disappear the second the shift ended. Then, before a survey, I watched the reconstruction: people rebuilding from memory what should have been captured as it happened.
The instrument tracking systems knew where every tray was. Every one of them. None of them could tell you whether the decision at the sink was the right one, or hand you the proof. That gap never closed. It just moved from facility to facility.
I built a company around sterile processing. The gap followed me everywhere.
For over a decade I ran SurgiHealth Solutions, working with sterile processing departments and the people who run them. Different facilities, different equipment, different tracking systems — the same gap, every single time.
The tracking layer kept getting better at answering where. Nobody was answering was the decision right, and can you defend it. After twelve years watching that question go unanswered, I decided to answer it myself.