• Kuan-Jung Lin, Ping-Chi Chen, Yu-Hua Fan, and William J S Huang.
• Division of Urology, Department of Surgery, Taoyuan General Hospital, Ministry of Health and Welfare, Taoyuan, Taiwan, ROC.
• J Chin Med Assoc. 2020 Apr 1; 83 (4): 382385382-385.

BackgroundTo evaluate the efficacy of an autoregistration monitoring system (ARMS) for tracking the placement and removal of ureteral stents.MethodsThe system was designed to tie in closely with the billing system. Once a stent was used and charged, a stent "episode" was created in the ARMS. When the stent was removed and the charge for the procedure was issued, the stent episode for that stent was removed automatically. The ARMS identified stents which exceeded their deadline, generating an alarm until the stent was removed and the ARMS updated.ResultsA total of 10 105 patients with 12 440 stent episodes were registered in the ARMS between March 2010 and August 2018. Of the 10 105 patients, 8597 (85.07%) were automatically detected to have had their stents removed before their deadline. We contacted the 1508 (14.93%) patients whose stents were not registered as having been removed by their deadline, of whom 122 (1.21%) had undergone stent removal at other hospitals, 490 (4.85%) had died, and 875 (8.66%) knew that they had ureteral stents inserted and were urged to come back for stent removal. Twenty-one patients (0.21%) did not know that they had implanted stents. None of these 21 patients were urological patients, and they had stents placed during urological consultation in an operating room.ConclusionOur study showed that the ARMS reduced the manpower in tracking stent removal by 85.07% and that it was useful for detecting and preventing forgotten stents.

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