New military medical kits - Saving lives and dollars

TAMPA, Fla., Dec. 11, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- A new line of military medical kits that increases the life saving capability of service men and women during a medical emergency while offering millions of dollars in cost savings to the DoD are being revealed this week.

The Mojo MARCH Individual First Aid Kit (IFAK) and Combat Lifesaver Kit (CLS) are the next evolution of two of the most impactful tactical military medical kits developed for the battlefield. The streamlined kits on display this week at the annual Special Operations Medical Associations Scientific Assembly are smaller and lighter than their predecessors, but the real magic is inside.

Once opened, an array of vividly colored packages helps guide the user through the appropriate treatment protocol based on the military's MARCH acronym that signifies the leading causes of battlefield deaths: Massive Hemorrhage, Airway, Respiration, Circulation and Head and Hypothermia. The ruggedized, tactical packaging is marked with icons and large instructions for use offering additional visual cues for quick product recognition. The kits are designed and organized to allow the user to work his way through the products in priority of treatment.

Combat Medical of Harrisburg, N.C., developer of the Mojo MARCH system, is convinced that all this allows for easier training and greater clinical outcomes. The training component is vital given that the vast majority of those who will use these kits in combat are among the least medically trained in the services. This is especially true for the IFAK.

"What these kits provide is confidence, and more importantly competence, when it's needed most," said Jason Cauley, Vice President of Business Development at Combat Medical. "It's been proven again and again, whenever you can standardize and simplify training, you get better clinical outcomes."

There is maybe no better tactical medical example of this during the past 13 years of U.S. conflicts, than the U.S. Army Rangers. The Rangers are extremely serious about trauma medicine; in fact it is one of their four pillars of individual proficiency. Rangers train rigorously and through their training have discovered the value of standardizing on products and how those products are organized in their kits. The intent is that any Ranger can open a fellow Ranger's kit and will see the same products in the same layout as his own, thus allowing him to take quicker and more decisive action toward saving a life. As a result, the Rangers are the only unit within the military to have demonstrated zero deaths in situations where the casualty's injuries would be determined as potentially survivable. This is in stark contrast to the 24.3 % of combat deaths being classified as potentially survivable in the military at large. Combat Medical used the Rangers as inspiration for their kits.

The inspiration for the business case behind the kits, however, was driven by a desire to support the DoD's efforts to achieve significant cost savings in the coming years, while relentlessly seeking improving in life saving kits, through lessons learned during the past 13 years of procurement and logistics challenges and successes. One of the ways the DoD would like achieve some serious cost savings is through the extended shelf life of expiring products – many of which fall into the world of tactical medicine – from the standard three years to five.

Combat Medical quickly determined that even if the products within the kits attained the desired five-year shelf life, the government cannot see the true financial benefits of this extension unless the products can be batch sterilized, giving the entire kit a single expiration date of five years.

By working with 19 partner companies from 15 states, including Teleflex, Innovative Trauma Care, Pulmodyne, Entrotech, Kingfisher, Z-Medica and others, Combat Medical acts as an integrator to offer just-in-time sterilization for certain products. This is a paradigm shift in terms of logistics for the DoD, but the potential direct cost avoidance is estimated to exceed 58 million dollars according to Combat Medical.

"We are extremely excited about the possibilities of these kits," said Cauley. "Not only by working with our fellow industry and military leaders in tactical medicine and logistics have we developed a new system that will save more budgetary dollars, but most importantly, we've continued to advance tactical medicine in a way that will surely save more lives."

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SOURCE Combat Medical