Ambu A/S
Improving Patient Care

Hospitals today are facing increasing procedure demand and point-of-care expansion. At the same time, they are experiencing enhanced reprocessing requirements driven by FDA recommendations and new standards and guidelines.

The new guidelines recommend moving to sterilization for high-risk scopes such as bronchoscopes, duodenoscopes, ureteroscopes, and cystoscopes. This makes reprocessing more timeconsuming and expensive, and due to staff shortages and higher staff turnover, maintaining compliance also becomes a cumbersome affair.

Enter Ambu A/S.

By providing a single-use option, Ambu helps customers improve their workflow, efficiency, and productivity for better patient care while eliminating the risk of cross-contamination. The company creates flexibility for customers to structure care delivery and procedure scheduling much more efficiently by eliminating the need for reprocessing.

“We free up resources in reprocessing that can be reallocated to other more value-adding patient care activities. In the current environment of severe staffing shortages this has tremendous value,” says Britt Meelby Jensen, the CEO of Ambu.

Ambu enables customers to move from a CAPEX-driven to an OPEX-driven endoscopy revenue model. Its singleuse endoscopy allows hospitals to move from a primarily fixed-cost model to a variable-cost model where the cost of endoscopy varies with activity and procedural volume. This gives hospitals a much more predictable cost model that is easily scalable.

As the pioneer of single-use endoscopy, Ambu is the only company that offers a comprehensive single-use endoscopy platform supporting multiple clinical specialties. The company has a unique modular innovation model, which enables sharing of technology and components across endoscopy specialties. This results in shorter development cycles for new products.

Ambu introduced the first single-use endoscope (aScope) to the market back in 2009. Due to the limitations of the technology at the time (CMOS image sensor), the initial focus was on simpler endoscopy procedures such as airway management. However, the performance and image quality improved and with the release of Ambu’s third-generation bronchoscope in 2013, the company was able to address bronchoscopies in the ICU and OR.

This year Ambu released aScope 5 Broncho, which is the first single-use bronchoscope designed for the advanced needs of interventional pulmonology, requiring high-performance functionality and imaging. The product performs better than the leading reusable bronchoscopes in some areas. Ambu has successfully expanded into several other clinical endoscopy areas, such as ENT, Urology and GI. The company has the largest pipeline of any single-use endoscopy company and will continue to invest in new technologies such as advanced image processing to further enhance the performance of its singleuse endoscope. As the leading singleuse endoscopy company, Ambu has a significantly larger scale compared to competitors, including dual continent manufacturing for optimal supply chain security.

Recently, one of Ambu’s newest innovations, the aScope 4 Cysto, was featured in peer-reviewed, high-volume research. The study from Assmus showed a dramatic cost savings of nearly $40,000 annually in going from reusable to single-use – but importantly, due to “improvements,” healthcare providers recommended making Ambu’s singleuse the standard, with a reusable as a backup. Additionally, in late 2021, in research presented by Dr. Hudson Garrett at the annual CHEST conference for pulmonologists, data showed that when comparing outcomes of patients receiving care with single-use bronchoscopes versus those receiving care with reusable bronchoscopes, the sterile, single-use population set saw a 53 percent reduction in quality metricimpacting readmissions. This implies that sterile, single-use equipment that is ready when the patient needs the care can have a significant impact on hospital costs, penalty avoidance, and quality metric standings.

“Through Ambu’s vision, we are able to provide the broadest specialty portfolio – impacting health care providers in nearly a dozen treatment and therapeutic areas and allowing workflows across the hospital to be improved,” says Jensen.