#139 2023 Year End Review of Our Podcast Sponsor-Partners

The Compliance Divas are committed to highlight only products and services that meet regulatory compliance and CDC Guidelines for Best Practices in Infection Control and Safety.  As we come to the end of the year,  The Divas want to thank our 2023 Sponsoring Partners by bringing  you a recap the products and services they offer to help Dental Practices provide safe dental care. 

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SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome. I'm Leslie Cannon. I'm Mary Gavoni. I'm Linda Harvey. I'm Olivia Wan. And together we are the Compliance Divas.

SPEAKER_01 0:20

Welcome to the Compliance Divas Podcast. We bring clarity and simplicity to compliance by navigating regulatory compliance to keep you on course. We ask you to subscribe to the Compliance Divas Podcast for your favorite podcast channel or through our website, thecompliancedeevas.com. The resources that we mentioned during our podcast can be found on the compliancedeivas.com website, and we encourage you to please submit your questions to support at thecompliancedivas.com. As your moderator for this program today, I'd like to pick a couple of our sponsors and talk about, first of all, Crystal Genics. They have a product that is the one product that you should be sterilizing, but you're probably not. Have you ever thought about your air water syringe? Now I'm not just talking about the tips, I'm talking about the handle, the buttons, what you hold in your hand to utilize either the air or the water buttons or both at the same time. CDC recommends that we heat sterilize all instruments and devices that are used into orally. And FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, way back in September of 1992, sent a notice to dentist to notify them that FDA recommends that any reusable dental hand pieces and related instruments such as the air water syringe and ultrasonic scalars be heat sterilized between each patient. I was just so thrilled, and I was excited to bring that information to our audiences and podcast listeners. Another exciting podcast we had where I really learned a lot was from Somatics, where the we talked about understanding hazardous waste in your office. Now, this podcast was podcast episode number 95. The Crystal Genics was podcast episode number 122. During this podcast, I came to understand how amalgam separators collect the amalgam waste or sludge, or even if we don't place amalgams in a patient's mouth, many times we prep teeth that have amalgams in them. And so this is trapped sometimes at the chair side and then sometimes goes through to the vacuum system where the amalgam separator is placed. And one of the things that I didn't know was how to actually check the amalgam separator to see whether it was full or not. And our guest on the program from Zomatics explained how to take a flashlight or even the light from your cell phone, which I carry with me all the time, and hold it behind the amalgam separator so you could see through and see how full it is. Now, the other thing I learned during this podcast was that amalgam separators have to be replaced annually. And a common conception is you can replace them only when they're full. When you replace them annually, you'll get a certificate of compliance, which is something that EPA may ask you for to demonstrate your compliance in replacing that device. Now I'm going to hand the podcast microphone over to Ardiva Mary to tell us a little bit about a couple of the episodes that she would like to highlight.

SPEAKER_00 3:59

Thanks, Leslie. I'm going to highlight two episodes and another one a little bit later on, but the first two are from our sustaining sponsor partner, Hugh Freedy Group. We podcast about their Greenlight Compliance Center, which is a great online tool for practices to be able to create their infection prevention and control protocols. It can be customized by the state that they're in if there are specific state requirements. And there are checklists to remind you what all that you need to do, and reminders that you are due for training, or you need to go back and just review your protocols to make sure they're up to date and so forth. And you can also log any like spore testing and um sterilization monitoring or even maintenance. You can create those logs in the green light portal. So everything is all online, everything is easily accessible, and you don't have to worry about keeping paper manuals, which drive everybody crazy. And sometimes people don't know where they are, they just grow legs and walk away from the practice. So we highly, highly recommend um investigating, becoming a member of Greenlight. You can talk to your local Hugh Freedy rep and they can explain how to qualify and help you actually to get your Greenlight portal for your practice set up. Another episode we did was episode number 100, and that was on biological monitoring. We all know that biological monitoring, making sure that our sterilizers are working effectively is very critical to patient safety. And Hufridi has two types of systems depending on what you like to use in your practice. There is a mail-in system, confirm monitoring, where you run your spore strips in your sterilizer and then you send it. They immediately notify you after they've processed it if there was a failure and kind of walk you through the steps that you need to take in making sure that your sterilizer is functioning. Although I will add that the first thing you need to do as soon as you get that notification there's a failure, is take that sterilizer out of service. It should not be used until you do another test and verify that it is functioning properly. And then the other product that Hugh Freedy has is um Spore Check, which is a 24-hour in-office spore testing system. And so you put a vial of um culture medium with microorganisms into your sterilizer, and then you put it in a small incubator that comes with the kit, and then based on color change, you know whether you passed or failed, and then you have a logbook that you keep the um records or the entries in from doing your SPOR test. So either one is acceptable in office or um mail-in service. I've heard a lot of questions from folks lately about the mail-in services with the mail taking sometimes a longer time to be delivered. So you may not get your results for about a week. And if you truly have a malfunctioning sterilizer, that might be a long time to wait. What many practices do is even a combination or a hybrid where they do three weeks out of the month in office and then send one out to a third party for verification at least once a month. So either of those are acceptable. And we hope that you will check the resources out for this episode and also episode 127, so you can look at these two great products from QFredi.

SPEAKER_01 8:03

Thanks, Mary. Linda, give us your perspective on the episodes that were your favorites.

SPEAKER_02 8:10

Leslie, there's two that I'd like to highlight. First is the ArmorGuard product, and we interviewed our friend in the industry, Debbie Z, that everybody knows. This product is new, and it is the next generation of disinfectant products for patients' oral appliances. And let's face it, many of us were oral appliances ourselves, whether it's an aligner or a retainer or a sleep device, there's many consultants also. So this has this product has so many uses across the industry for home use, for off use in the office, for cleaning appliances for patients. And the nice thing about it is that not only does it kill so much of the bacteria, but it's 99.99% according to all the studies, but it's just it's not harmful. And that's what's beautiful about this. It's a special formulation of parasitic acid and hydrogen peroxide. So after you spray your appliance and let it sit for three minutes and rinse it off, there's no residue, there's no harm to the patient. But 99.999% of the bacteria is killed. And so there's no more odor on the device either. So I think that's a really great best-in-class new product that came out this year. And that was episode number 131 for our listeners. The second podcast that I'd like to showcase was episode number 110 with health first. And this was a really interesting conversation we had with how to manage controlled substances and dental settings. There are many more dental practices, in addition to oral surgeons, but general dentists that are providing IV sedation in their offices and doing different types of surgeries. So, thus, the use of controlled substances is growing. Um, I'll say I won't say popularity because it's a controlled substance, but it's growing in practice habits in dental offices. So it's really important that particularly our doctors, but the entire team understands some of those compliance regulations because they must comply with the US Department of Um the US Controlled Substances Act, pardon me, the DEA. And so how they're managing these and disposing of them is extremely important because there are federal guidelines. So, Leslie, I want to point our listeners back to that one in particular if you are using controlled substances in your practice or thinking of adding some kind of surgical procedures and will be using controlled substances in the future. So those are my two highlights, Leslie, from oral appliances to controlled substances. Back to you.

SPEAKER_01 10:31

And I want to just uh make a point about the oral appliance disinfection and making sure that they smell good. Um, I have grandkids who are in uh football this year and they have to wear the bike guards. And of course, um the oral hygiene is important for their teeth and their gums, but they don't think often about disinfecting their bite guards. Otherwise, they are uh you know facing stinky bite guards to go along with those stinky football uniforms and socks. And another thing I wanted to mention was on the health first episode on managing controlled substances, many times when I do consulting in a dental office and I do their audit, I find that they're not managing that waste properly. In some cases, they're even throwing it out in outside of their office into just into the dirt or the environment into the gravel around their office. And so this particular episode made a very strong point about making sure that you're compliant because you certainly don't want to have regulatory agencies march into your office and cite you for not managing your controlled substance waste properly. Our Diva Olivia is not with us today, and she wanted to cover the dental unit waterline protocols and independent waterline testing. And this is such a perfect subject for her because at our last OSAP annual session, the Organization for Safety of Sepsis and Prevention, Olivia participated in a mock trial surrounding a dentist who was being sued for uh not managing dental unit water properly. Um, and it involved not only the dentist uh, but also the dental unit manufacturer themselves. And it was a very interesting, long but very helpful uh mock trial to help us understand what our liabilities are when we are uh operating a dental practice and how a patient might be harmed. And so one of our episodes, episode number 113, again was Hugh Friedi, our wonderful sustaining sponsor partner, where they helped us understand what a successful dental unit water line protocol looks like. They gave us some step-by-step uh action steps on everything on how to uh to go ahead and draw your solution your sample. Uh they talked about their 24-hour um processing system, which is I think the fastest that I've seen. Maybe there's others, but I've only uh really experienced and actually used the 24-hour system on my own refrigerator water that was from Fiffredi. So I encourage folks to take a listen to that. Uh, dental unit water is certainly an important topic, especially since there's the case in Southern California with the children's dental group where there are over 200 lawsuits currently uh in the process of being settled. When the settlements occur, uh we will hear big news surrounding how patients won big awards from the uh their the dental office that they were seen in because of dental unit water that was uh highly colonized and contaminated. And the other uh sponsoring partner that I wanted to speak about was called a company called Dentista Safe, where Dentisafe actually is an independent waterline testing company. So they don't sell products or other services, they simply focus on dental unit waterline testing. And on the Compliance Divas uh podcast resources, that episode, episode number 85, there's a list of steps that you can use for drawing a water sample and some other helpful information for you. So I encourage our listeners to take a listen. Our our podcast guest was Leonard Hilliard, Landon Hilliard, and uh and he was pretty interesting to listen to as he described the various different parts of independent waterline testing. Mary, you had a couple of other thoughts, right?

SPEAKER_00 14:29

I do, and one going back to um dentistafe. Keep in mind that when you are testing your water and looking for CFU counts, you're not going to get a report of what types of microorganisms are in your dental unit water. So if there's a specific need to know, or you just want to know what's there, then Dentasafe is the type of service that you would use that actually gives you um not only the microbial counts, but the types of bacteria that are actually growing in the water. And sometimes that's important to um to know. Then I also want to highlight episode number 90, which again was from our um sustaining sponsor partner, Hugh Freedy Group. And in that episode, we talked about the myths about instrument management systems. Now I think the biggest myth and we that we discussed in the episode was that using an instrument management system like cassettes is very expensive because you have to buy all these cassettes, and maybe you have to buy a bigger autoclave or you have to buy a bigger ultrasonic unit, but that is very easily recouped. Um, your return on that investment is pretty quick because uh you increase the efficiency of managing those instruments rather than assistants or hygienists or other team members having to spend a lot of time um individually managing instruments and having to resort into setups and and then package them and sterilize them. You have one item. You have the cassette that you put into the ultrasonic or the instrument washer, then you inspect the instruments inside, make sure they got cleaned, rinsed, dry, wrap, or package and sterilize. So it's much, much more efficient. But another key advantage is safety. Um, some research has shown that the most common injury that happens in a dental practice is punctures from contaminated instruments that happen during the instrument cleaning process. So if you're handling instruments loose, not inside of a cassette or some kind of a container, there's a higher propensity for those kinds of injuries to happen. And it's easier to just manage one thing, one cassette, one in even a standardized cassette that you could use for, for example, all the restorative procedures in your practices. So you didn't have to worry about um looking through a drawer to find the right setup for the right procedure. You just know that this is a restorative cassette, that's the one I'm gonna use. I have a hygiene cassette, um, maybe one that's for um a profile versus one that's for scaling and root planing. And so I can easily just kind of grab and go from my storage area with my instruments all in one nice container that also makes it safer to transport from the um treatment room to the instrument sterilization area. There's no instruments loose gonna fly around if somebody gets bumped into in the in the hallway. So again, it's episode number 90, examining myths about instrument management systems, might be worth another listen just to see how you could make 2024 a better, more efficient, and safer year for you.

SPEAKER_01 18:14

And Mary, uh, you may want to add the uh extra bonus and benefit if you purchase 10 cassettes from Hugh Freedy. What do you get?

SPEAKER_00 18:24

You get complimentary membership in the Greenlight Compliance Center. And it doesn't mean you have to purchase them in addition to what you may already have. If you have purchased 10 cassettes in somewhere in the lifespan of the practice, then you qualify. And so if some of our listeners maybe have um heard about Greenlight before, there were some different requirements, some um purchasing requirements of different supplies um that you had to maintain each year to be um qualified for it. But 10 cassettes and you're in, and the Greenlight Compliance Center is just a really great efficiency tool.

SPEAKER_01 19:09

Well, thanks, Mary. I think we've covered the year in review of our sponsoring partners and some of the takeaways from their episodes that they had with us. We gave you the episode numbers, and we're also going to uh have you have access to all of those resources again by going to the compliancedevas.com. If you look at either the episode or the uh resource page, you can reach those resources. Linda?

SPEAKER_02 19:38

Leslie, let's ask our listeners to give a shout out on social media what was their favorite podcast this year. So we would love to know your thoughts as you're listening to the podcast. I know there's so many areas of safety, compliance, tips, products, so forth that we've talked about. It's maybe hard to pick out one, but pick out two or three. But just tell us what your favorites were. We'd love to hear from you on social media. I think this was a great episode to not only thank our partners this past year, Leslie, but also just to remind our listeners at the end of the year what are some of the things they should keep on the radar, like Mary said, to have even a safer, you know, more productive 2024.

SPEAKER_01 20:14

Well, let's sweeten the pot even more. And let's say that we will award a compliance divas mug delivered to you. If you are offering up your favorite episode, we will at random pick a winder from our social media, uh, the Facebook page for the compliance divas, or even on our LinkedIn page. In closing, we bring clarity and simplicity to compliance by navigating regulatory compliance to keep you on course, and we encourage you to submit your questions to support at the compliancedivas.com. When you go to your favorite podcast channel, please subscribe to the compliance divas so you can be alerted to whenever we have a new weekly episode. And sometimes you might find that we have important announcements from CDC or OSHA to bring to your attention right away. So the subscription will alert you immediately. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast channel. Just scroll to the bottom of the podcast uh show notes and look for the place to leave a review. Thank you so much for joining us today, and we hope that 2024 is a productive and safe new year for everyone.