Time Savings Study

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BACKGROUND: Due to the recent Covid-19 pandemic, the need for PPE, including isolation gowns, has increased exponentially. Healthcare systems all over the world have encountered an increased need for these critical supplies. The number of uses per day/week/month/year has also increased at a similar rate. The patented EZ-USE design on the Benko Medical, LLC Level 2, Reusable Isolation Gown claims to make the process of donning and doffing safer, faster and more efficient. Ultimately saving time and money for healthcare systems. 

METHODS: 

• In this 10 attempt donning and doffing timing analysis; Both the traditional reusable isolation gown and the patented EZ-USE reusable isolation gown were placed on a platform at waist height. A timer was started at the beginning of the process to don the gowns, and then stopped once the gown was donned completely, and correctly. 
• This process was done again for the process to doff the gowns. 
• One single participant repeated this process for ten attempts and times were recorded. 
• The fastest and the slowest times were discarded, leaving the middle 8 timed attempts to be averaged. 
• These times are then multiplied to assess the ability to save small segments of time, translating into much larger times savings.   

CONCLUSIONS: This 10 donning and doffing attempt time analysis objectively and conclusively shows that the use of the Benko Medical, LLC patented EZ-USE Level 2 Reusable Isolation Gown saves time. The results for the eight usable timed attempts reduced the time to don by a total of 4 minutes and 45 seconds. The reduced time to doff the EZ-USE gown for the eight usable attempts was 2 minutes and 31 seconds.
The total time saved by the use of the EZ-USE gown, to both don and doff 8 times, was 6 minutes and 16 seconds.
The conclusion can be made that this reduced time to don and doff can be multiplied by the average number of donning and doffing attempts for any healthcare system. In the below example, taken from the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, in 2012 (pre Covid), they were using circa 1,000 traditional reusable isolation gowns per day.  

Traditional Isolation Gowns: Time to don 1,000 times: Time to doff 1,000 times: Total time to don and doff 1,000 times: 791 minutes (13.18 hours) 407 minutes (6.78 hours) 1,198 minutes (19.96 hours) 

EZ-USE Isolation Gowns: Time to don 1,000 times: Time to doff 1,000 times: Total time to don and doff 1,000 times: 195 minutes (3.25 hours) 88 minutes (1.47 hours) 283 minutes (4.71 hours) 

Total Time Reduced/Day with the EZ-USE Level 2 Reusable Isolation Gown: 915 minutes per day (1,000 attempts) 15.25 hours per day (1,000 attempts) (The average salary/dollars per hour, paid to healthcare workers is approximately $24/hour, the daily cost savings in payroll is $366/day; or $133,590/year).