May 27, 2026

Mente received an NSF Phase IIB supplemental award to advance the Forever Tag, a permanent RFID tag for surgical instruments designed to support durable instrument-level data across reprocessing, clinical use, and long-term tray optimization.

March 30, 2026

Surgery generates significant waste and resource use due to inefficient, overfilled trays. Mente deploys RFID to optimize trays and eliminate unnecessary instruments. This reduces waste, water, and energy use while improving efficiency.

February 13, 2025

HIGHPOWER VTLS demonstrated that Mente tags do not harbor bioburden and are cleanable through standard, automated washer processes per the instrument manufacturer IFU.

October 8, 2024

Mente achieved SOC 2 Type II certification for security, availability, and confidentiality, reinforcing our commitment to protecting customer data and meeting the security expectations of health systems.

November 16, 2023

Mente received an OEDIT Advanced Industries award to accelerate commercialization of the RFID-based instrument tracking platform and expand scalable deployment for tray optimization and OR efficiency.

August 14, 2023

Mente received an NSF SBIR Phase II award, building on our Phase I work to advance individual instrument tracking and predictive instrument management, using a new intraoperative data stream to improve operating room efficiency and reliability.

February 1, 2023

Mente’s Surround Tag enables reliable individual instrument tracking by using a complete wrap, durable thermoplastics, and in-house manufacturing to deliver multi-foot read range at the surgical site.

June 15, 2022

Lessons from 100+ hospital interviews on how to run tray optimization that scales: get real usage data, design exception pathways, and maintain improvements with ongoing measurement.

March 10, 2021

Interviews with Dr. Brenessa Lindeman and Dr. Courtney Balentine reveal what the endocrine tray paper doesn’t capture: multi-site complexity, naming chaos, tray politics, and how to make standardization stick.

January 19, 2022

We validated an RFID system that measures intraoperative instrument use with near-perfect agreement versus human observation. The resulting data enabled confident tray reductions and showed how accurate measurement can make OR efficiency work scalable and sustainable.

February 27, 2021

In a breast surgery pilot, we used intraoperative RFID tracking to identify unused instruments and reduce a surgical tray without compromising case readiness. The study shows how objective use data can make tray optimization faster, repeatable, and easier to sustain.

September 8, 2020

An interview with Dr. Martin Koyle on reducing a hernia tray from 96 instruments to 28, plus the real-world constraints hospitals face when trying to scale standardization.

August 5, 2020

An interview with Dr. Martin Koyle on reducing a hernia tray from 96 instruments to 28, plus the real-world constraints hospitals face when trying to scale standardization.

July 1, 2020

Mente was awarded a Phase I STTR to develop instrument usage analytics that help hospitals streamline surgical trays and reduce unnecessary reprocessing in the OR and sterile processing.

May 24, 2020

Mente licensed Duke-developed RFID technology to generate instrument usage data that helps hospitals streamline trays, reduce reprocessing burden, and improve operating room efficiency.