New Military Medical Kits Save Lives and Dollars

Once opened, an array of vividly colored packages helps guide the user through the appropriate treatment protocol, based on the military's MARCH acronym, which signifies the leading causes of battlefield deaths: Massive Hemorrhage, Airway, Respiration, Circulation, and Head and Hypothermia. The ruggedized, tactical packaging is marked with icons and large instructions for use, offering additional visual cues for quick product recognition.

The kits are designed and organized to allow the field user to work through the products in priority of treatment, which also allows for easier training, a vital component in improving clinical outcomes, since that the vast majority of those who will use the kits in combat are among the least medically trained; this is especially true for the IFAK. By standardizing the kits and placing the same products in the same layout, users can take quicker and more decisive action toward saving a life.

The cost savings of the new kits is achieved through extending shelf life of expiring products, many of which fall into the world of tactical medicine, from a standard three years to five. This is achieved by batch sterilizing individual MARCH components, giving the entire kit a single expiration date of five years. By working with 19 partner companies from 15 states, the developer of the Mojo MARCH system, Combat Medical Systems (Harrisburg, NC, USA), was able to act as an integrator to offer just-in-time sterilization for some of products.

“What these kits provide is confidence, and more importantly competence, when it's needed most. It's been proven again and again, whenever you can standardize and simplify training, you get better clinical outcomes,” said Jason Cauley, vice president of business development at Combat Medical Systems. “Not only by working with our fellow industry and military leaders in tactical medicine and logistics have we developed a new system that will save more budgetary dollars, but most importantly, we've continued to advance tactical medicine in a way that will surely save more lives.”

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Combat Medical Systems