Our Story
It Started With a Better Way
In 2013, in Dayton, Ohio, Innovative Sterilization Technologies began with an idea.
Healthcare was changing. Surgical procedures and medical devices were becoming more advanced, but the workflows surrounding sterilization and instrument reprocessing still presented opportunities for greater efficiency.
We believed there could be a better way, so we built one.
ONE TRAY® introduced a different approach to sealed sterilization containers, one centered on efficient instrument reprocessing and designed around the realities of the people responsible for getting instruments ready for surgery.
But the longer we worked alongside Sterile Processing teams, OR professionals, surgeons and healthcare leaders, the more we realized something important:
The opportunity was much bigger than a sterilization container. It was the entire surgical workflow.
Could instrumentation be organized more efficiently? Could a surgical procedure require fewer trays? Could reducing the number of trays also reduce the amount of handling, processing, storage and transportation surrounding them? And could all of those improvements work together rather than being addressed individually?
Those questions led us from a container to a connected workflow.
We saw an opportunity to rethink how those instruments were organized which led to the creation of EZ-TRAX™, a modular instrument organizational system that allows instrumentation to be reconfigured and organized into fewer trays.
But, what happens before and after those trays are processed?
Instrumentation still has to move between departments. That led to ONE CART™, our sealed case cart designed for the transportation of sterile and/or contaminated medical devices.
Three products. Three different parts of the process. One connected objective.
Then Our Story Met Tim's
Years before Tim Tzimas became President and CEO of IST, he was confronting many of the same challenges from a completely different side of healthcare.
Tim spent more than 25 years in the orthopedic, neurosurgical and healthcare industries. He had been in operating rooms. He had worked alongside surgeons. He understood medical device manufacturers. And he had seen firsthand the amount of instrumentation that could accompany an orthopedic procedure.
As surgical technology advanced, something stood out to him. Robotics and preoperative planning were giving surgical teams more information about a procedure before the patient ever entered the OR. Yet large numbers of instruments and trays could still follow a traditional path into the facility.
That disconnect presented an opportunity. Tim and his teams began looking at instrument consolidation, not simply taking instruments away, but thoughtfully determining what was needed and organizing those instruments in a way that made sense for the procedure and the people handling them.
In one initiative, seven orthopedic trays were reconfigured into three. But consolidating the instruments created another challenge: how do you organize the new sets effectively?
That search brought Tim to IST.
He discovered EZ-TRAX™. Then ONE TRAY®.
Years later, that connection would bring Tim to Dayton, not as a customer or industry partner, but as the next leader of IST.
That is where the next chapter of IST began and it started with our new Mission and Vision:
Our mission is to redefine sterilization through efficient, scalable solutions that uphold the highest standards of patient care.
And our vision is to be the ONE TRAY® that impacts how healthcare operates.
Our story is still being written, and we welcome you along to be a part of it.