True story: One Sunday in the kitchen, a newlywed couple were making dinner together. Noticing that she cut both ends of the roast, the husband asked her why. Stopping, she looked up and admitted that she really didn’t know. She explained that it was how her mother made it. Curious, she called her mother and asked why she cut the ends off her pot roast and the mother said the same thing. Calling the grandmother, they all got a chuckle. It turns out that is how the grandmother had always made pot roast because the only pot she had was too small for the roast. The lesson – Past solutions don’t always meet today’s needs.
Here’s one example: Hospitals are increasingly recognizing that water quality directly impacts patient safety, particularly in sterile processing departments (SPDs), yet managing it remains a challenge. The real cost of poor water quality—like staining and pitting on surgical instruments or persistent bacterial contamination—is often felt in the operating room, but the root causes are scattered across multiple departments. Facilities, infection control, purchasing, and surgical services typically operate in silos, making water quality a fragmented responsibility.
Even when surgical staff notice issues like staining or equipment damage, it’s rarely clear who owns the problem. Procurement teams rely on spreadsheets and bid packages that split responsibilities across multiple vendors and contracts. But the complexity of complying with new standards like AAMI ST108 requires a coordinated approach—one that doesn’t fit neatly into the current supply chain model.
A key insight is that most vendors involved in water systems don’t fully understand how water quality affects clinical outcomes. They understand their specific equipment, but not the downstream impact on surgical instruments or infection control. They also tend to provide only what’s asked of them—so if hospital staff don’t know the right questions to ask, they often won’t get what they truly need.
Hospitals that want to meet the AAMI ST108 standard need to think differently. Water isn’t just a utility—it’s a complex variable with at least 18 factors that can interfere with cleaning, sterilization, and ultimately, patient safety. Eliminating water as a root cause allows teams to more quickly pinpoint other sources of contamination or damage.
The real challenge isn’t awareness or even technology—it’s overcoming institutional inertia. Even when hospitals acknowledge the risks of outdated water management practices, internal protocols often prevent meaningful change. Group purchasing structures, legacy vendor relationships, and the mindset of “this is how we’ve always done it” can block progress.
Until hospitals align their internal systems to prioritize water quality across departments, even the best solutions may remain out of reach—not because the problem can’t be solved, but because no one has been empowered to own it.