Picked-not-used supply waste estimator
Start with your service line. Every assumption below is editable — if you know your real numbers, use them. The estimate is only as good as what you put in, and we show you the arithmetic.
Free tool · No login · No patient data
Every day, supplies get picked, opened, and never used — then dropped in the trash because they broke sterility. Most departments have never put a number on it. This puts a defensible number on it in about sixty seconds.
Run the estimateBuilt by an orthopedic & neurosurgical coordinator at a Level II trauma center.
Start with your service line. Every assumption below is editable — if you know your real numbers, use them. The estimate is only as good as what you put in, and we show you the arithmetic.
A surgeon changes technique, switches to a different suture, stops using a retractor. The card doesn't change. Five years later the pick list still pulls all of it — every case, into the room, onto the field, into the trash.
Card maintenance sits between the surgeon, the coordinator, materials management, and the EHR team. Work that belongs to four people belongs to none of them. So it doesn't happen.
Opened-and-unused doesn't show up as a variance. It's already charged to the case. It only shows up as a slow, unexplained climb in supply cost per case — which gets blamed on vendor pricing.
Over-picking bloats the case cart, slows the count, and buries the tech in packaging. Under-picking sends someone to the core mid-case. Both cost minutes you're already being measured on.
This calculator does one thing: it multiplies your case volume by your disposable supply cost per case by the share of that supply which gets opened and never used, then applies a recovery factor because not all of it is capturable. There is no black box.
The defaults are starting points drawn from typical ranges by specialty, not from your facility. They are meant to be overwritten. If you replace all four inputs with your own numbers, the output is your number — and the arithmetic is shown so anyone in your finance office can check it in thirty seconds.
No patient information is collected, transmitted, or stored by this tool. All calculation happens in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere unless you choose to request the report below.
We'll send a one-page breakdown you can put in front of an administrator: your numbers, the methodology, the assumptions stated plainly, and the specific questions to ask your materials management team to validate it.
We send the report and occasional notes on OR operations. No spam, unsubscribe anytime, and we never share your address.
FirstCase is built by working OR staff — not by a software company guessing at the workflow. Our tools come out of problems we hit on shift: call schedules nobody trusts, preference cards nobody maintains, instrument sets nobody standardized, and new techs nobody had time to train properly.
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