KODA Ideaworks

04/30/2026

Thank you to the WMU Alumni Association for sharing Karen's story! Karen Orr, our CEO and co-founder, carries her Western Michigan roots into everything she builds at KODA Ideaworks. The needlestick injury she experienced years ago became the spark for HypoHolder, and that same passion for protecting healthcare workers is what drives the entire team today.

Thank you to WMU for highlighting the story.

For this alumna, healthcare is all about changing lives in and out of the operating room. ❤️‍🩹

Early on in her career, Karen Orr (M.S.'03, Medicine) experienced a needlestick injury during surgery, an event that left a lasting impression and sparked a deep commitment to improving safety for healthcare workers.

Today, she has taken that passion a step further by founding KODA Ideaworks, a startup for developing a safety-engineered medical device, a HypoHolder, that prevents hypodermic needlestick injuries in operating rooms.

Karen hopes that future success with her company will allow her to give back to Western for helping her launch her career. Once a Bronco, ALWAYS a Bronco. 💛

04/28/2026

A meaningful moment from AORN Global Surgical Conference & Expo. Our CEO and co-founder Karen Orr, PA with J.D. Buchert, MSN, M.Ed., MS, RN, CNOR, newly elected Vice President of AORN and Workforce Safety Manager for Quality and Safety Operations at Parkland Health.

J.D. is a U.S. Army combat veteran, Bronze Star and Purple Heart recipient, and has spent more than three decades championing the people who care for patients. He understands needlestick injury not as an abstract statistic, but as something that changes lives. We are honored to share his words on why HypoHolder matters:

"For those of us who have spent our lives in healthcare, the risk of a needlestick injury is more than an inconvenience, it's a moment that can change everything. I've seen firsthand how a single stick can alter a career, a family, and a future. That's why an innovation like HypoHolder is so important. It's simple, intuitive, and effective, the kind of real-world solution that every clinical environment should have. Protecting healthcare workers isn't optional; it's essential. HypoHolder represents the progress we've been waiting for."

Congratulations, J.D., on your election. We are honored to have leaders like you in the mission to reduce needlestick injuries and protect the healthcare workforce.

04/27/2026

A memorable moment from AORN Global Surgical Conference & Expo in New Orleans. Our CEO and co-founder Karen Orr, PA had the privilege of connecting with David Reinhart, DNP, MBA, RN, CNOR, FAAN, who took the gavel as AORN President at the close of this year's conference.

David brings 37 years of perioperative nursing experience and currently serves as Director of Nursing Education for Emory Healthcare's Perioperative Services Enterprise. Conversations with leaders like David, who have spent decades inside the OR, are exactly why we show up. Their perspective shapes how we build, validate, and scale HypoHolder.

Congratulations, David, on the new role, and thank you for the time and the conversation. We are grateful for leaders who keep raising the standard for surgical safety.

04/24/2026

What a week at AORN! Our CEO and co-founder Karen Orr was on the ground at Booth #2109, connecting with the OR nurses and surgical teams who inspired HypoHolder in the first place.
Every conversation was a reminder of why we do this work: healthcare workers still face preventable needlestick injuries every single day, and the people closest to the problem are the ones with the best ideas for solving it.

Thank you, AORN community, for the warm welcome, the honest feedback, and for everything you do to keep patients and colleagues safe. We're just getting started.

👉 Learn more at hypoholder.com

04/20/2026

The True Cost of a Needlestick Injury Is Rarely the One That Shows Up on the Ledger. Every two minutes, a U.S. healthcare worker sustains a needlestick injury. The CDC estimates more than 800,000 occur annually, a figure most experts consider conservative, given that 40–60% of incidents go unreported.¹
The costs compound across three dimensions that rarely appear together in the same conversation:

- Clinical. Exposure to HIV, HBV, HCV, and more than twenty other bloodborne pathogens, with the potential for life-altering, and in rare cases fatal, sequelae.
- Psychological. PTSD, occupational anxiety, and attrition from the profession — compounded by the silence, shame, and underreporting that distort incidence data and delay institutional response.
- Financial. An average of $4,352 per injury for initial post-exposure workup, over $1 million in lifetime costs per confirmed seroconversion, and an estimated $3 billion in annual U.S. healthcare expenditure when liability, turnover, burnout, and downtime are fully accounted for.²

Twenty-five years after the Needlestick Safety and Prevention Act, these numbers should not still be this high. They persist because a meaningful share of injuries occur not at the point of device activation, but in the handling moments in between — uncapping, recapping, hand-to-hand passing, and temporary stabilization during procedures.

Addressing those moments is an engineering-controls problem, not an education problem. That is the work.

Sources: ¹CDC/NIOSH; International Safety Center EPINet. ²Daniels Health (2022); American Hospital Association.

04/17/2026

This is why HypoHolder exists. Karen Orr, PA, was closing a case on a patient with uncontrolled Hepatitis C when she suffered a needlestick. It was an accident, the kind that happens every single day in ORs across the country. Instead of accepting it, she invented a solution.

70% of hypodermic needlestick injuries in the OR occur during uncapping, recapping, and disposal. HypoHolder eliminates all three risk points, with one hand, without disrupting the sterile field, without changing your workflow. This week at AORN, Karen demonstrated exactly how it works. Watch it here. 👇

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04/06/2026

HypoHolder is featured in the OR Today Spring 2026 print edition, the official Guide to AORN Expo 2026. AORN brings together the perioperative community like nothing else. Being featured in this issue puts HypoHolder right in the middle of that conversation.

If you are heading to AORN in New Orleans this week, come find us at Booth 2109. We would love to show you what HypoHolder does and why it matters.

Needlestick injuries are preventable. HypoHolder was built to protect the people at risk.

Read our feature: https://lnkd.in/eSYd-YjU

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04/03/2026

800,000+ needlestick injuries occur in U.S. healthcare every single year. That's one injury every 39 seconds.These are not freak accidents. They are predictable, documented, and preventable. HypoHolder was built by surgical clinicians who lived this risk firsthand. Our mission is simple: no one should get hurt doing their job. Learn more at hypoholder.com

04/02/2026

We're proud to have HypoHolder listed in OR Today Magazine's Product Showroom, a trusted resource for the surgical community. HypoHolder was built by surgical clinicians who lived the problem firsthand. Seeing it recognized by one of the leading publications in perioperative care is a meaningful milestone for our team and for the mission. Needlestick injuries are preventable. HypoHolder was built to protect the people at risk.

Read the full listing here: ortoday.com/koda-ideaworks-hypoholder/

HypoHolder is an innovative needle safety device designed to reduce needlestick injuries during hypodermic needle handling in the operating room. Developed by surgical clinicians with decades of firsthand OR experience, HypoHolder addresses the highest-risk moments of hypodermic needle handling, inc...

04/01/2026

Zero needlestick injuries. Across six facilities. All of which had higher than average injury rates before HypoHolder.

We are honored to be featured in OR Today Magazine's March 2026 cover story, and even more honored to be putting real numbers behind a problem the OR world has accepted for too long.

Sharps injuries in the perioperative setting are up 16% from a decade ago. Every existing safety device on the market protects after the needle is used. HypoHolder is the first one that protects during the procedure, when 70% of hypodermic needlestick injuries actually happen.

Our founder Karen Orr built HypoHolder after sustaining a needlestick injury herself. HypoHolder is clinician-designed, FDA-registered, and now being evaluated for a major federally funded research partnership at a Level I Magnet-status trauma center.

Full feature here: https://ortoday.com/technology-and-safety-in-the-or/

Technology and safety go hand-in-hand in today’s operating rooms and ambulatory surgery centers. A wide range of technological advances are making surgery safer for patients and practitioners than at any time since the advent of modern surgery.

03/31/2026

We are excited to be exhibiting at the AORN Global Surgical Conference & Expo 2026 in New Orleans! Find us at Booth #2109, April 11-14.

AORN is the professional home of perioperative nurses, with more than 40,000 members who work in and around the OR every day. This conference brings that entire community together: clinicians, educators, policy leaders, and the people driving what safety in the surgical suite looks like.

AORN's updated 2025 Sharps Safety Guideline calls for stronger engineering controls and organizational accountability, because data shows sharps injuries continue to rise in the perioperative setting even as they've declined elsewhere in healthcare. Today, 43% of all reported needlestick injuries occur in the OR.

HypoHolder was built for exactly this moment. FDA-registered, clinician-designed, and aligned with AORN's 2025 guidelines, it's the first device that protects OR workers during the procedure, where 70% of hypodermic needlestick injuries actually happen.

If you'll be in New Orleans, we'd love to see you at Booth #2109.

AORN Global Surgical Conference and Expo is the largest surgical nursing education event in the world. Join fellow perioperative nurses, leaders, managers and educators!