Radhika Bawa, Founder of Esbee Dynamed, opened a recent talk at ISHACON with a question most CSSD heads will recognise immediately: how much of your day goes into searching versus managing? For most sterile stores in India today, the honest answer is still “searching” for a tray, a set, a register entry that should have taken seconds to find.
The pressures making that gap harder to ignore are real and specific. A single specialised tray can cost more than a luxury car, and if it’s sitting untracked in the sterile store, that’s dead capital. And hospitals are pushing for faster turnover on top of it all: “can we get this tray back in four hours?” is a question that needs data behind it, not a guess.
From tracking to intelligence
The direction Bawa pointed to isn’t just digitising what already happens on paper — it’s making the CSSD predictive rather than reactive. The analogy she used: a modern aircraft doesn’t wait for something to fail mid-flight, it tells the pilot a system is underperforming before that happens. A CSSD built the same way would flag a struggling vacuum pump before a cycle fails, pull up an instrument’s full sterilisation history in one click instead of 500 pages for an NABH audit, and estimate inventory needs from patient workload instead of guesswork.
None of the underlying technology is exotic – barcoding, 2D matrix codes, digital sterilizer integration, RFID, computer vision, even early robotics and AI applications are already deployed in CSSDs today. The gap isn’t tooling. It’s adoption.
The staircase, not the leap
One of the more useful parts of the talk was the explicit pushback against trying to digitise everything at once. Bawa’s framing was a three-step staircase, not a jump:
Audit first (Month 1–2). Find where time actually disappears; is it searching for sets, or filling registers? Check whether the infrastructure can even support digitisation: LAN ports near autoclaves, Wi-Fi that reaches the sterile store.
Standardise before you digitise (Month 3–5). You cannot digitise chaos. Tray lists need to be fully accurate and SOPs frozen before software enters the picture and software should come before hardware. The system’s logic matters more than the screen displaying it.
Pilot small (Month 6). Start with one high-volume department — Ortho or General Surgery tend to work well and find a “digital champion” on staff who’s genuinely excited about the shift. Peer-to-peer training, in Bawa’s experience, outperforms a vendor’s manual by a wide margin.
Set-level tracking is the sweet spot, not instrument-level
A myth Bawa was direct about correcting: instrument-level tracking — laser-etching every scissor — is often assumed to be the goal, but for most Indian hospitals today it’s neither necessary nor practical. Set-level tracking, knowing exactly where “Ortho Tray A” is at any given moment, already eliminates most of the chaos manual logs create, without the cost and labour overhead of tracking every individual instrument.
And the data worth having doesn’t show up immediately. The first 30 days after going digital are typically the hardest, glitches includedan d Bawa pointed to abandoning the system at the first sign of friction as the most common mistake she sees. The real value, utilisation reports and cost-per-cycle numbers, tends to surface only after three to six months of disciplined use.
Ergonomics is the actual compliance lever
The talk’s last practical point was about what makes staff actually use the system day to day, rather than work around it. Rugged, glove-friendly touchscreens that survive heat and steam. Scanning instead of typing; if staff are still typing instrument names, the logbook has just moved to a screen, not disappeared. And simple visual cues over data overload: a red-light, green-light system staff can read at a glance, rather than a dashboard they have to interpret.
As Bawa put it: the biggest fear in any CSSD is that technology will slow things down. Get the ergonomics right, and that fear stops being a reason to wait.
Esbee Dynamed markets Pivot Smartflow, a made-in-India product from Healthtech Pivot, a sister company.