Medtronic has announced the US launch of Spine Essentials, a new platform of spinal implants and instruments designed to make the most common cervical spine fusion procedures more efficient and help hospital systems manage costs, while maintaining quality.

The goal of Spine Essentials is to help surgeons and their staffs streamline the most common spinal fusions, by providing the exact tools in the right quantities needed to perform 1- and 2-level cervical spinal fusions, while reducing the costs and time required for instrument sterilization, case set up and inventory management.

Spine Essentials was developed in collaboration with leading surgeons and administrators and launched today at the Ambulatory Surgical Center Association (ASCA) annual meeting in Dallas.

"As a surgeon who routinely performs these types of surgeries, it's helpful to optimize the implants and tools, so we're being as efficient as possible to provide the best care possible to our patients," said Dr Richard NW Wohns, orthopedic surgeon at neoSpine in Puyallup, WA and one of the physicians who collaborated with Medtronic to develop the platform.

To develop Spine Essentials, Medtronic partnered with healthcare systems across the US to evaluate unmet needs and identify efficiencies. Spine Essentials implant sets include the most commonly used implant sizes for 1- and 2-level fusions of the neck (anterior cervical discectomy and fusions) and are sterile packaged with smaller instrument sets; thereby reducing the amount of inventory a hospital needs to sterilize, set up and store. This platform will reduce sterilization costs associated with the procedure, including:
•~44 percent fewer instruments to sterilize compared with the full-sized configurations.
•91 percent fewer items to sterilize compared with the full-sized instrument and implant sets.
•67 percent reduction in number of cases to sterilize compared with the full-sized instrument and implant sets.

"Healthcare systems are under intense economic challenges, and Spine Essentials is an example of how Medtronic can bring value to spine surgery by optimizing costs and efficiency," said Mr Doug King, senior vice president and president of Medtronic's Spinal business, which is part of the Restorative Therapies Group at Medtronic. "We're committed to delivering successful patient outcomes more efficiently, but we can't do it alone which is why Spine Essentials was developed with the input of physicians and hospitals."

Spine Essentials incorporates technology developed by Dr Gary K Michelson.