Codonics Triumphs Again

Codonics Triumphs Again: Celebrating the Simple, Transformative Innovation of the Safe Waste System

It’s official: Codonics is joining an elite group as a two-time TAG Award winner! 

This year, the excitement centers on the Safe Waste System (SWS), recognized in the Healthcare: Medication Safety & Compliance Innovation category. This innovation is a testament to solving real-world, practical problems that save lives and simplify complex workflows.

Mike Kohlberg, General Manager, and Cristy Berg, Vice President of OEM Marketing, Communications, and Global Trade Shows at Codonics, joined us recently on TAG’D Beyond the Award to celebrate this win and detail the innovation that earned it.

Bridging the Gap Between Anesthesia and Pharmacy

For years, controlled substance waste and reconciliation in the operating room (OR) represented a persistent blind spot in healthcare. It was a time-consuming, manual process that forced pharmacy teams to chase down anesthesia providers, sometimes days later, to resolve discrepancies. This introduced compliance risk, delayed charge capture, and created a substantial administrative burden.

The Codonics team realized the “holy grail was to put it in the operating room, put it right at the point of care”. The SWS achieves this by providing an intuitive, point-of-care solution that identifies, measures, assays, and securely documents controlled-substance waste in seconds. Crucially, SWS is built as an extension of the existing Safe Label System, completing a powerful closed-loop medication safety platform that links preparation, administration, and waste.

A Win for Practicality and the Clinician

The TAG Award judges praised the SWS for its simplicity, highlighting how simple design is often the hardest to achieve in a complex environment like healthcare. Mike and Cristy emphasize that the success of SWS comes from intentionally staying embedded with their customers, both anesthesia and pharmacy, to solve problems they didn't even know they could ask to have solved.

This recognition is a source of immense pride for the entire Codonics team, validating the years of development, listening, and execution that went into the product. As Cristy notes, the award reinforces the company's motto: building solutions that providers trust and love to use, thereby driving accountability and control forward in patient care.

LISTEN NOW: Codonics Triumphs Again on the TAG'D Podcast!