Zebra's Industry Solutions can give your business a competitive advantage by connecting people, assets and data to help you make better decisions.
Scale and energize your retail strategy with a digital backbone that unifies your team, informs priorities and drives results with Zebra's retail technology solutions.
Zebra’s mobile computing, scanning, and printing solutions connect each operational area in your warehouse to give you the agility to realize transformational gains.
Zebra's healthcare technology solutions provide patient identity management, mobile health devices, and business intelligence data to improve efficiency.
Zebra’s manufacturing technology solutions enable manufacturers to become more agile, optimize plant floor performance and embrace market changes.
Zebra's market-leading solutions and products improve customer satisfaction with a lower cost per interaction by keeping service representatives connected with colleagues, customers, management and the tools they use to satisfy customers across the supply chain.
In today's world, the demands on transportation and logistics companies are higher than ever. Dedicated Warehouse, Fleet and Delivery, and Yard and Terminal solutions enable visibility to every aspect of your business and keep operations running flawlessly around the clock.
Zebra's hospitality technology solutions equip your hotel and restaurant staff to deliver superior customer and guest service through inventory tracking and more.
Empower your field workers with purpose-driven mobile technology solutions to help them capture and share critical data in any environment.
Learn how Zebra's public sector technology solutions empower state and local governments to improve efficiency with asset tracking and data capture devices.
Zebra's range of Banking technology solutions enables banks to minimize costs and to increase revenue throughout their branch network. Learn more.
Zebra's range of mobile computers equip your workforce with the devices they need from handhelds and tablets to wearables and vehicle-mounted computers.
Zebra's desktop, mobile, industrial, and portable printers for barcode labels, receipts, RFID tags and cards give you smarter ways to track and manage assets.
Zebra's 1D and 2D corded and cordless barcode scanners anticipate any scanning challenge in a variety of environments, whether retail, healthcare, T&L or manufacturing.
Zebra's extensive range of RAIN RFID readers, antennas, and printers give you consistent and accurate tracking.
Choose Zebra's reliable barcode, RFID and card supplies carefully selected to ensure high performance, print quality, durability and readability.
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Zebra's environmental sensors monitor temperature-sensitive products, offering data insights on environmental conditions across industry applications.
Keep labor costs low, your talent happy and your organization compliant. Create an agile operation that can navigate unexpected schedule changes and customer demand to drive sales, satisfy customers and improve your bottom line.
Empower the front line with prioritized task notification and enhanced communication capabilities for easier collaboration and more efficient task execution.
Get full visibility of your inventory and automatically pinpoint leaks across all channels.
Reduce uncertainty when you anticipate market volatility. Predict, plan and stay agile to align inventory with shifting demand.
Drive down costs while driving up employee, security, and network performance with software designed to enhance Zebra's wireless infrastructure and mobile solutions.
Explore Zebra’s printer software to integrate, manage and monitor printers easily, maximizing IT resources and minimizing down time.
Make the most of every stage of your scanning journey from deployment to optimization. Zebra's barcode scanner software lets you keep devices current and adapt them to your business needs for a stronger ROI across the full lifecycle.
RFID development, demonstration and production software and utilities help you build and manage your RFID deployments more efficiently.
RFID development, demonstration and production software and utilities help you build and manage your RFID deployments more efficiently.
Zebra DNA is the industry’s broadest suite of enterprise software that delivers an ideal experience for all during the entire lifetime of every Zebra device.
Advance your digital transformation and execute your strategic plans with the help of the right location and tracking technology.
Boost warehouse and manufacturing operations with Symmetry, an AMR software for fleet management of Autonomous Mobile Robots and streamlined automation workflows.
The Zebra Aurora suite of industrial automation software enables users of all experience levels to solve their track-and-trace and vision inspection needs.
Zebra Aurora Focus brings a new level of simplicity to controlling enterprise-wide manufacturing and logistics automation solutions. With this powerful interface, it’s easy to set up, deploy and run Zebra’s Fixed Industrial Scanners and Machine Vision Smart Cameras, eliminating the need for different tools and reducing training and deployment time.
Aurora Imaging Library™, formerly Matrox Imaging Library, machine-vision software development kit (SDK) has a deep collection of tools for image capture, processing, analysis, annotation, display, and archiving. Code-level customization starts here.
Aurora Design Assistant™, formerly Matrox Design Assistant, integrated development environment (IDE) is a flowchart-based platform for building machine vision applications, with templates to speed up development and bring solutions online quicker.
Designed for experienced programmers proficient in vision applications, Aurora Vision Library provides the same sophisticated functionality as our Aurora Vision Studio software but presented in programming language.
Aimed at machine and computer vision engineers, Aurora Vision Studio software enables users to quickly create, integrate and monitor powerful machine vision applications without the need to write a single line of code.
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Build your reputation with Zebra's certification offerings. Zebra offers a variety of options that can help you progress your career path forward.
Build your reputation with Zebra's certification offerings. Zebra offers a variety of options that can help you progress your career path forward.
Healthcare providers around the world are all under common pressures. The “triple squeeze,” we call it. Rising incidents of chronic illness, an ageing population and a shortage of clinical staff all mean our heroes are doing more with less. Everyone wants solutions that save these front-line workers time and resources, allowing them to do what they do best, which is give their time to patients. However, we can’t solve anything until we fully understand from where problems are stemming. Swapping out some mobile devices or adding a new app to digitalize a task may help hospital staff work a little faster. But neither will alleviate patient queues on their own, mainly because there are many factors impacting patient care capacity, with some of the largest needing specialized technology tools.
For example, the pandemic unfortunately diverted a lot of clinicians’ time away from patients suffering chronic or deprioritized acute ailments, with hospitals putting the brakes on routine operations as staff dealt with the immediate impacts of the pandemic. But as Covid-related hospitalisations declined and staff started to recover, there was an assumption that life had returned to normal for everyone. Unfortunately, it did not, with life quality actually declining for a huge number of people due to a treatment backlog. Routine orthopaedic operations such as knee and hip replacements were pushed out, making the difference between a happy, active mobile life, or a painful, immobile existence for multitudes. And whilst efforts to get things back to pre-pandemic operational scale has been monumental across the global healthcare community, there remains much more to be done. According to the BMA, in the UK alone, 7.22 million people were waiting for treatment in February 2023, with three million of these patients waiting over 18 weeks. Around 362,500 of these patients have been waiting over a year for treatment, which is 169 times higher than before the pandemic began.
So how can you and your team make things more efficient to get more procedures done and to alleviate the queues?
Let’s begin by looking at how operations are done.
Now, I realize, there are many different types of surgical procedures routinely undertaken at your hospital, and that it’s likely that cataract surgery and caesareans are among them. (They do top the list of procedures across Europe right now, after all.) So, let’s consider what these very different procedures have in common. Each has a sterile surgical tool kit associated with it, provided to surgeons after they scrub in. Then, once the operation is undertaken, the dirty instruments are packed up and sent back off to sterile services, often at a separate location, to be sterilised in autoclaves before being set up again. Typically, the kits are wrapped in plastic to protect from airborne germs before being catalogued and stored in anticipation of their next usage.
Though this sterilisation process is great in theory – “reuse and recycle” is always a winning proposition – there is a lot of room for error. Imagine a procedure has unexpected complications and implements are temporarily lost when the team is moving the patient to a new location. What happens then? What if surgeons must use the same limited equipment for multiple operations? How do you ensure that trays, with their finite shelf life prior to re-sterilisation, get used in an efficient order? How do you trace trays back to patients to check devices were not left internally or to alleviate a disease concern such as CJD?
If items are lost, the initial strategy is probably to look for them, which is smart. But this search is going to probably eat up a significant amount of clinicians’ time daily. In one four-hour study, nearly four hours was taken up by eight clinicians searching for assets. That's a 12.5% inefficiency – or a business case for another non-clinical teammate.
If items aren’t easily – or ever – found, a 'first do no wrong' approach is probably to buy additional stock so no one must spend a second looking. But is this really best? Surgical devices are sold at a premium, making this is a very expensive approach. (So, probably not best.) Factor in the unnecessary cleaning of trays due to poor inventory management and there are additional energy costs and carbon emissions to add to the equation. Then think about an inability to pinpoint where instruments are located which, worst case scenario, can add additional procedures like X-rays and a whole heap of extra anxiety. All these elements combined place a heavy burden on an already stretched team and restricted-capacity system.
So, I ask you: what if there was a magic wand? One that could free up time. Time that could be reinvested in whittling down waiting lists and giving patients an extra dose of 1-2-1 care.
Well, the secret’s out. There is. And the wand is real, and its already out there, helping hospitals around the globe regain time to reinvest in care. Perhaps not quite the magic of fairy tales but with spellbinding qualities that are grabbing healthcare leaders’ attention in droves.
Now, our wand is actually an RFID reader and part of a wider tracking solution based on RFID technology. Nonetheless, it’s quite magical. In other verticals such as retail and warehousing, the ‘wand’ is waved around storerooms and, as if by magic, gives instant viewing of whatever stock lies hidden from view. Turn on the item-finder mode and via a series of beeps – much like the ‘hotter, colder’ game of youth – you can track down specific items in no time at all.
To take away 'yet another task for clinicians', technology infrastructure to enable automation can be strategically placed around a healthcare facility. RFID antennas and readers placed around entry and exit points of an operating room, storage room, or where it makes sense – e.g., at a processing table or at an autoclave – can report item location, even when in motion. Every time an item leaves or returns, it is automatically logged by a unique identification code placed on it via an RFID label carefully designed to withstand whatever the medical device, surgical instrument or kit endures.
This base RFID infrastructure links to a database where the interesting bit happens. Each asset you’re tracking has data associated with it linked to hospital workflows. In the case of surgical trays, this will include where it was last logged, when it was last cleaned, which patients it was used with, and so on. Suddenly you’ll have instant visibility, alleviating all the aforementioned pains of not knowing where surgical kits are or what state they’re in. You now know the kit is clean, it is being used systematically, all the pieces are present and where it is.
In fact, one hospital in the UK recently completed a Sterile Services RFID project as part of a much wider location solutions rollout. As a result, surgical trays can now be searched for on a desktop PC and the RFID ‘wand’ used to locate them in storerooms. Even if they are in the wrong place, they will be found. This is a huge benefit to patients, as their operations will not be cancelled due to missing sterile trays and instruments. Mitigating risk is key as well. For example, should a heart surgery instrument tray be dropped, another one can be located in seconds, ensuring minimal delay to vital surgery. The hospital’s clinical team says they’re already seeing improvements to patient care, as well as time savings and a reduction in procurement costs.
The magic of a sterile services location solution is that there is less time spent hunting for things, sterilisation becomes more efficient, and patients feel safer. Plus, all this freed time and resource can be ploughed back into patient care.
So, if you want to know the location and status of your sterile equipment, then contact Zebra’s Healthcare RFID specialist team to discuss how we can work with you to build a similar solution – one that works best for you.
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Wayne is the Zebra lead for Healthcare solutions and works to directly improve patient care, supporting partners and end users. Delivering the latest solutions that assist hospitals and healthcare organizations to deliver efficiencies and improve patient care and outcomes. Wayne has worked for Zebra Technologies for 17 years and has a true passion for healthcare, technology and innovation.
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