"In 1996 the hospital started doing instrument tracking with another company (SIIS) and got stuck with the Microsoft NT 3.5 platform and there was no one around to migrate the data," King said.

"With Surgidat we had to purchase some XP touchscreens as it is much easier than using a mouse while using a hand scanner to read instrument barcodes, and we relocated a server so if parts of the network go down we can still track surgical instruments.

"We started the initial tender in June 2005 and the system was completed and implemented in October and all the database listings were transferable and at that stage Surgidat was the only company that could show us an actual barcode scanner in action, because all the other companies that applied to the tender were still developing one."

Initially 12 vendors replied to the tender and Surgidat won because of access to the scanner.

The value of the tracking system according to King is when instruments are collated on surgical trays needed for surgery.