There are so many things in dentistry that we have to worry about. From COVID issues to team strife to insurance (and a mountain of other difficulties), being a dentist is a job of solving 100 small problems a day.
When that’s your job, you’re forced to put some things to the back of your mind. These are the things that we just blindly trust because we don’t have the mental energy to think otherwise. We trust that our car will start in the morning. We trust that the air-conditioning will work at our office. We trust that our curing lights work. And most important, we trust that our autoclave is properly sterilizing instruments.
Now, we rarely test our car battery’s health. We might quarterly get an HVAC inspection. As I have covered before, most dentists don’t test their curing lights, but most of us routinely do check our autoclave. The problem is that we do so in a pretty archaic way that takes days for results—valuable days in which patients are being treated with instruments supposedly sterilized in that autoclave. What happens to them if your autoclave fails a test that you send off? Scary thought, I know. There has to be a modern way to test an autoclave, right? There sure is, and the good folks at 3M have done it.
More Pearls:
Airway Armor by Zirc
Clearfil Majesty ES-2 by Kuraray Noritake Dental
The 3M Attest Mini Auto-reader 490M is a small incubator designed to give you sterilization monitoring in 24 minutes, right in your office. No more mailing spore tests and receiving faxed results—this is sterilization testing for the 21st century. The Attest Auto-reader 490M has a small countertop footprint so it won’t take up a bunch of space in your office. It has four wells, all designed with automatic readers for 3M’s biological indicators. These wells incubate and automatically read the biological indicators and store the results.
One cool feature of the Attest Auto-reader 490M is that it connects to a PC via USB to communicate with the Attest Connect application. This will store and organize your results for easy record keeping. No more filing a faded, crumby fax in an old Trapper Keeper to gather dust on a shelf. This is 2021…an app can do it.
You will need to make sure you get the right biological indicators for your autoclave. 3M has a tool to help you determine that by answering three easy questions about your sterilization setup. Once you have the Attest Mini Auto-reader 490M and your appropriate biological indicator, you’re a short 24 minutes away from peace of mind! Line drive single to right field for the Attest Auto-reader 490M.
Editor's note: This article appeared in the November 2021 print edition of Dental Economics.
