Q&A: Clarium CEO Steve Liou on Using AI to Improve Supply Documentation and Reduce OR Waste
Key Highlights
- Clarium Vision uses in-room cameras and AI to automatically document surgical supplies, reducing manual entry and administrative workload for nurses.
- The platform provides integrated data to standardize preference cards, minimize waste, and facilitate collaboration between clinicians and supply chain teams.
- Hospitals have identified millions in potential savings through Clarium's data-driven insights, highlighting its impact on reducing unnecessary supply expenditures.
- AI-powered tools help maintain accurate, up-to-date preference cards, ensuring supplies are used efficiently and unused items are minimized.
- The partnership aims to embed seamless, real-time supply management into clinical workflows, enhancing patient safety and operational efficiency.
In June, Clarium announced a strategic partnership with Mount Sinai Health System, one of the nation’s leading academic health systems. Through the collaboration, Mount Sinai will deploy Clarium’s supply capture and preference card optimization capabilities across eight hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers, bringing new technology to one of healthcare’s most complex and costly operational environments: the operating room.
The stakes are high. Mount Sinai performs approximately 100,000 surgical procedures each year, generating enormous volumes of supply utilization data while requiring careful coordination among clinicians, perioperative leaders, and supply chain teams. At the same time, health systems continue to face mounting pressure to control costs and reduce waste. According to Clarium, U.S. hospitals waste an estimated $25.7 billion annually on unnecessary supply chain spending, often driven by fragmented data, manual documentation processes, and outdated governance practices.
As part of the partnership, Mount Sinai will deploy Clarium Vision, a computer vision-enabled platform that uses in-room cameras and artificial intelligence to automatically capture surgical supply usage at the point of care. The technology is designed to improve documentation accuracy, reduce administrative burdens on nursing staff, and provide health systems with better visibility into supply utilization without disrupting clinical workflows.
HPN spoke with Clarium CEO Steve Liou about how Clarium Vision supports clinicians, strengthens collaboration between clinical and supply chain teams, and helps health systems identify opportunities to reduce waste and optimize preference cards.
How does Clarium Vision make life easier for clinicians?
Liou: Currently in most operating rooms, nursing staff have to use a barcode scanner or manually type in all the supplies and devices that are used during a procedure. This process is tedious, time-consuming, and distracts from a nurse’s primary responsibility of ensuring the best possible outcome for a patient during surgery. Our Clarium Vision product uses mobile cameras and trained AI models to capture surgical supply and implant usage at the point of care. All a nurse needs to do is point a phone camera at the item and it will automatically get documented in the EHR. This leads to more accurate documentation, better patient safety, and lets nurses focus on patient care, not administrative work.
How do Clarium's systems and technologies foster collaboration between clinicians and supply chain teams?
Liou: Most health systems lack standardization across their surgical preference cards, which are the supply lists, typically maintained within the EHR, that specify which items, instruments, and implants a surgeon prefers for a procedure. In the case of one health system we work with, they had 140 different surgeons using 140 different preference cards for a single procedure. This kind of variation leads to waste and inefficiency.
Clarium gives health systems a trusted source of integrated data on surgical supply utilization, which reduces waste and improves patient safety. We can help them create a gold standard procedure card, based on case utilization, item popularity across individual preference cards, and availability of clinically equivalent, lower-cost item alternatives. Enables supply chain teams and perioperative leaders to have productive conversations with clinicians on potential changes to their supply requests.
For Clarium Vision, we anticipate the AI-enabled cameras to give health systems insight that will further streamline and optimize surgical supply selection. The cameras take tedious, administrative work off the plates of the nursing staff and offer a future that can be seamlessly embedded into the clinical experience.
In what ways do Clarium's technologies reduce waste / unused items in the OR?
Liou: Clarium’s platform offers a single source of data into a health system’s supply chain that can inform them where they are overinvesting in certain items that are not frequently used or are completely unused. We can also generate insights that help these health systems proactively prepare for disruptions of certain items in the OR. The data really helps health systems look at the overall picture around spend and waste. For example, we’ve helped Mount Sinai identify $3 million in annual savings. For another academic health system, we’ve identified $26 million in savings.
How can clinicians protect against unused items?
Liou: To prevent wasted, unused items ending up in the trash in the OR—two changes go hand-in-hand: one, ensuring accurate supply documentation and utilization data reliability, and two, continually updating and maintaining preference cards that detail surgical supply “pick lists.” These two efforts build on each other with accurate, reliable utilization data, teams can more accurately maintain, and update preference cards based on what’s really used in surgical procedures. Our Clarium Vision solution significantly helps improve documentation data accuracy, and our Card Optimizer tool helps optimize surgical supply lists based on this real-world utilization data.
How does Clarium streamline and optimize preference card processes?
Liou: Existing EHR tooling for preference card updating is highly manually intensive and a headache for perioperative teams to maintain. One benchmark health system with seven hospitals had over 30,000 preference cards across its surgeons. Maintaining accurate supply requests and accurate quantities is a nearly impossible task to handle manually on already overburdened teams.
Clarium’s preference card capability connects directly with a health system’s EHR to analyze actual case utilization data, then generates evidence-based recommendations to reduce waste, standardize procedures, and streamline operations. It uses historical utilization data to identify which items on a preference card are consistently used, which are rarely used, and which are missing. Clarium leverages AI-driven automation for the majority of card updates, minimizing clinical resourcing needs to review updates.
Any other context you'd like to provide for our readers?
Liou: While the challenges of optimizing supply purchasing and reducing waste are well-appreciated by healthcare supply chain teams, until now, they've been limited by access to clean, reliable data as well as actionable trusted recommendations for what to change, and tools to engage with clinical teams. We believe that Clarium Vision and our platform will be able to provide these actionable insights and help solve some of these long-running challenges.
