Aging i.STAT Devices

I knew Abbott replaced with refurbished instruments, but I didn't realize they replaced with equivalent aged devices. That is not helpful! I guess I need to check our service contract.

Some of our devices are so old that when they replace them "in kind" we get one that's a few years younger.
My hospital has 20 I-Stats, soon to be 22.  I asked for three new ones on the 2026-2027 capital budget, and I plan to do so each year until we have replaced all of the aged devices.

Abbott recommendation they told me a few years back was to plan for 7 years. But that really depends on the volume of usage and how the area is with their equipment. We have some that are 20 years old and still working.  I ask for a few of the aging devices to be replaced every year, but our capital committee won't usually replace unless they are actually broken.

We have 70+ iStats in our system. We had some that were 20+ years old. We have been doing a capital buy plan for the last couple of years and slowly replacing our fleet. It has been working well for us so far. 

Hi Beverly,
  The internal clock failure is an issue for sure.  It has wreaked havoc in a couple of situations at our large health system, with potentially hundreds of results going out with the wrong time stamp, especially if the location does not have an upload lockout set up in DE (definitely recommend doing that!).  And yes, I have heard the "7-year" lifespan quoted and that all bets are off after that, including whether the internal clock fails.  We have old devices as well, and they get replaced with generally similarly old devices.  I would settle for having an alert popup on the handheld or in the data management system indicating the internal clock has failed, but no word on whether that could ever happen.