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 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 mobile computing, scanning, and printing solutions connect each operational area in your warehouse to give you the agility to realize transformational gains.
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.
Zebra's location technologies provide real-time tracking for your organization to better manage and optimize your critical assets and create more efficient workflows.
Zebra's rugged tablets and 2-in-1 laptops are thin and lightweight, yet rugged to work wherever you do on familiar and easy-to-use Windows or Android OS.
With Zebra's family of fixed industrial scanners and machine vision technologies, you can tailor your solutions to your environment and applications.
Discover Zebra’s range of accessories from chargers, communication cables to cases to help you customize your mobile device for optimal efficiency.
Zebra's OEM scan engines, imagers, and private label OEM products offer flexible integration and help enhance product development with modern OEM technology.
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.
Adding innovative tech is critical to your success, but it can be complex and disruptive. Professional Services help you accelerate adoption, and maximize productivity without affecting your workflows, business processes and finances.
Zebra's Managed Service delivers worry-free device management to ensure ultimate uptime for your Zebra Mobile Computers and Printers via dedicated experts.
Find ways you can contact Zebra Technologies’ Support, including Email and Chat, ask a technical question or initiate a Repair Request.
Zebra's Circular Economy Program helps you manage today’s challenges and plan for tomorrow with smart solutions that are good for your budget and the environment.
The Zebra Knowledge Center provides learning expertise that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of your environment.
Zebra has a wide variety of courses to train you and your staff, ranging from scheduled sessions to remote offerings as well as custom tailored to your specific needs.
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.
Financial sustainability. Digital transformation. Regulatory compliance. These are all hot topics when healthcare leaders collaborate with stakeholders – such as technology providers, suppliers and government – in pursuit of a sustainable, smart health community. However, one driving factor always tops the agenda: patient care.
The first key step on the road to an optimal patient outcome is positive patient identification. Hospitals need to ensure the right patient is transported to the right place at the right time, that the patient receives the right treatment and that the whole patient journey is fully documented. The easiest and, arguably, most cost-efficient way to accomplish this goal is with the use of wristbands.
How Wristbands Help to Improve Patient Care
As a best practice, it is recommended that patients receive a wristband with a unique barcode upon admission to your hospital. This barcode enables you to make patient-specific information such as a name, date of birth, medical number, previous conditions and allergies accessible to all who will interact with patients during their hospital stay. This barcode can be scanned via enterprise-grade handheld mobile computers or rugged tablets during:
- Patient bedside observations: This is one of the more commonly-used wristband applications today. Using a barcode scanner-equipped mobile device, healthcare providers can quickly retrieve all of a patient’s personal information collected via intake forms and historical medical records in a single view in real time. This automatically reduces paperwork volume during the course of care and allows for a more collaborative and informed care process that improves patient safety and outcomes. For example, the ability to identify and respond to deteriorating patients – and escalate to the relevant clinician and clinical team immediately – facilitates faster communications and action.
- Patient transport: Wristband barcode scanning improves the quality and safety of service. It also shortens patient waiting times and increases porter productivity, as one Dutch hospital group can attest. It was the first hospital group in the Netherlands to use barcoded wristbands to ID patients at the bedside, and healthcare leaders were pleased with how the wristbands improved the quality of care whilst reducing the risk of errors. So, when they were evaluating ways to improve patient transport activities, they decided to introduce a digital “order” system that sent patient transport requests to hospital porters via handheld mobile computers. As you will see in this success story, the porters now use the mobile computers to scan a patient’s wristband upon pickup to verify his or her identity and destination. The wristband is then scanned again when the patient has safely been delivered to his or her destination, enabling the hospital to track patient movements in real time.
- “Scan to patient” scenarios: Wristbands are a critical tool in ensuring the patient is receiving the correct medication at the correct time and that suitable equipment is being utilised at the point of care, whether at the bedside or during an operation. Wristbands also assist with inventory management, allowing healthcare facilities to monitor use levels and automatically reorder as needed. Just as importantly, they help with implant traceability in case of recalls or batch defects, as The Hexagone Neuilly Group has learned. A Zebra wristband-centric solution is enabling this group of eminent French clinics to conform with the European Union (EU) Medical Devices Regulation, which dictates that healthcare providers must be able to trace all products used during medical operations. Like others, The Hexagone Neuilly Group believed it best to automate its implant traceability process – and the first step was to use wristband scans to correlate a patient’s identity with a specific implant to complete the implant registration process. But the benefits of this implant traceability solution were not exclusive to this single workflow.
As The Hexagone Neuilly Group has successfully demonstrated, the technologies that comprise patient identification systems are often very versatile. Their use can (and should) extend far beyond patient-focused applications. There are many cases in which the same technologies used in the above three examples are also used to digitalise and/or streamline:
- Unique Product Identification
- Inventory Control
- Centralised Purchasing
- Asset Tracking
- Staff Location
Together with the right software, hardware solutions that include wristbands, mobile computers, scanners, tablets and/or printers ensure insurance and regulatory compliance, streamline asset traceability, reduce errors and drive efficiencies and cost savings for the healthcare sector. They also deliver actionable intelligence and clinical evidence of the long-term suitability of implants or medication per demographic, which is a critical step forward on the road to the sustainable, smart health community that governments, patients, healthcare providers and Zebra collectively envision for the future. But, if we are to achieve that end goal, one priority should remain constant at the heart of every healthcare system: optimal front-line patient care, of which wristbands (and patient ID systems) are a fundamental building block.
###
Editor’s note:
Tune into Your Edge each week for more healthcare-related news and insights from around the world. You can also subscribe to our Healthcare RSS feed for real-time updates from our industry experts.
Wayne Miller
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.
Zebra Developer Blog
Zebra Developer Blog
Are you a Zebra Developer? Find more technical discussions on our Developer Portal blog.
Zebra Story Hub
Zebra Story Hub
Looking for more expert insights? Visit the Zebra Story Hub for more interviews, news, and industry trend analysis.
Search the Blog
Search the Blog
Use the below link to search all of our blog posts.
Most Recent
Legal Terms of Use Privacy Policy Supply Chain Transparency
ZEBRA and the stylized Zebra head are trademarks of Zebra Technologies Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. ©2024 Zebra Technologies Corp. and/or its affiliates.