ClearCount Medical Solutions, a Pittsburgh-based company focused on improving surgical safety, has announced the availability of SmartSponge. The system incorporates RFID tags into surgical sponges to help prevent medical teams from inadvertently leaving sponges inside surgical patients. First unveiled in mid-2006, the system leverages passive 13.56 MHz RFID tags from Texas Instruments‘ Tag-it HF-I tags, which are smaller than a dime and support the ISO 15693 and 18000-3 standards. SmartSponge received market clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in June 2007 (see RFID-enabled Surgical Sponges a Step Closer to OR). ClearCount will officially launch the SmartSponge system at the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN) annual congress, being held this week in Anaheim, Calif. The SmartSponge system includes a tray with a built-in RFID interrogator that records the number of tagged sponges in pre-packs as workers set them on the tray at the start of an operation. After a procedure is completed, used sponges are discarded into a SmartBucket, a receptacle with its own RFID interrogator that records the tags in the discarded sponges. A small LCD screen displays the counts, confirming whether there’s a match. The system also incorporates an RFID interrogator, known as a SmartWand, enabling surgical teams to scan a patient during postoperative safety checks, and to locate any sponges mistakenly left behind. In addition to the system’s availability, ClearCount has also announced a distribution agreement with Cardinal Health, a provider of health-care products and services. Under the terms of this deal, Cardinal Health will become the primary distributor for ClearCount’s SmartSponge system to hospitals, surgery centers and other health-care distributors in the United States. Cardinal Health will offer the SmartSponge system as part of its Presource surgical kits, and as a stand-alone offering.