Mente Medical offers a data-driven solution aimed at optimizing surgical instrument trays to enhance operating room (OR) efficiency and reduce costs. Their platform uses RFID technology to track instrument usage during surgeries, allowing hospitals to significantly cut down the number of instruments in each tray without compromising surgical outcomes. By optimizing trays, Mente helps reduce the complexity of OR setup and teardown, lowers sterile processing workloads, and minimizes instrument-related errors. Developed, tested and used at Duke Health, the Mente system has shown substantial reductions in the number of instruments needed, with some surgeries seeing up to 70% of instruments removed without subsequent requests for the eliminated tools. This streamlining not only improves workflow but also translates to significant cost savings— up to $100,000 in annual savings per OR. This technology ultimately leads to faster OR setup, less tray weight, and improved patient care.

The OR Black Box is an innovative AI-driven platform designed to revolutionize surgical environments by addressing critical needs in patient safety, quality improvement, skills mastery, and operational efficiency. This comprehensive solution integrates ambient technologies, data analytics, video capabilities, and artificial intelligence to provide actionable insights across the surgery department.
Key features of the OR Black Box include:
-Room State: Offers real-time analytics and predictive insights to optimize scheduling and reduce unplanned overtime.

-Surgical Safety Checklist: An auditing and benchmarking tool ensuring compliance with safety procedures at critical points during surgery.

-Case Discovery: Leverages AI to automatically detect clinical and operational outliers, enabling root cause analysis and quality improvement through video review.
-OR Explorer: Provides a growing library of surgical videos for education, research, and performance enhancement.


The platform promotes transparency, continuous improvement, and care standardization by allowing organizations to compare surgical performance and identify best practices. It streamlines surgical suite workflows, maximizes efficiency, and enhances staff satisfaction.
Developed by Surgical Safety Technologies Inc. (SST), the OR Black Box is built on research excellence through partnerships with leading hospitals. It integrates with existing systems while future-proofing organizations through an open platform for emerging innovations.
With over 80 peer-reviewed publications supporting its efficacy, the OR Black Box empowers surgical teams to systematically analyze and refine their performance, driving continuous, data-driven optimization in surgical care delivery.

Our solution tracks instrument usage in a realtime, automated fashion. 

AI-Driven Insights: Utilizes advanced AI and machine learning for autonomous risk detection and predictive insights, going beyond traditional EHR data tracking.

Real-Time Analytics: Provides real-time operating room analytics, allowing for immediate operational adjustments.

Customizable Annotation Framework: Offers tailored video analysis tools for center-specific needs and metrics, unlike the more rigid structures of most EHRs.

Continuous Improvement Engine: Facilitates ongoing performance optimization through comparative analytics and best practice identification.

Open Platform Architecture: Designed to integrate with existing systems and accommodate future innovations, offering more flexibility than closed EHR systems.

Surgical Safety Checklist Integration: Incorporates specialized tools for monitoring and improving surgical safety checklist compliance.

Advanced Operational Optimization: Offers predictive insights for scheduling and resource allocation, going beyond basic EHR scheduling capabilities.

Comprehensive Video Integration: Incorporates video capabilities for surgical procedures (open, lap, robotic), enabling visual review and analysis not typically available in competing systems.

Multifaceted Approach: Addresses patient safety, quality improvement, skills mastery, and operational efficiency in a single platform.

Surgical-Specific Focus: Designed specifically for high-acuity surgical environments, offering specialized features not found in other solutions.

Research-Backed: Supported by over 80 peer-reviewed publications, demonstrating proven value and efficacy.

Automated Outlier Detection: Automatically identifies clinical and operational outliers for focused improvement efforts.

Surgical Safety Checklist Integration: Incorporates specialized tools for monitoring and improving surgical safety checklist compliance.

Surgical Safety Network: Facilitates cross-organizational collaboration and benchmarking for safety and quality initiatives.