Labelling solutions for healthcare

Our custom label service will design a label to meet your specifications whatever the size, colour and material, based on your functional needs. You need to be confident that a label will perform well when used in direct thermal or thermal transfer applications.

Bar codes must scan successfully and the label material, inks or adhesives must not damage the printhead. Genuine Zebra labels and ribbons are tested thoroughly to ensure best performance in Zebra printers and to enhance printhead life.
Zebra Technologies can offer hundreds of different high-quality off-the-shelf labels and tags. These include a wide range of media specially designed for healthcare applications:

• Printable wristbands for patient identification
• CryoCool labels for low-temperature storage applications in laboratories
• Durable direct thermal labels ideal for case-note and X-ray labelling
• Direct thermal labels for medication and test sample labelling for both desktop and mobile printers
• Durable synthetic labels for identifying surgical packs as they are sterilised
• Secondary blood-bag labels for type and donor traceability

Patient identification, using Zebra wristband media and printers, provides a critical first step in many patient safety improvement initiatives. Incorporating a bar code or an RFID tag as well as text provides a vital extra safeguard against mistaken identity. Using printed rather than handwritten wristbands also ensures that all required data is present. Nothing is left to chance.

HC100 Wristband Printers

Medical records that carry a printed label incorporating a bar code are a more reliable way to ensure that each patient’s record can be uniquely identified and tracked. In a busy outpatients’ department, it is not unusual for there to be two patients attending who have similar names. Crosschecking a bar code ensures that records do not get put into the wrong folder and it is a quicker and more accurate check than one done purely visually.

Desktop Printers

Laboratory specimens need to be accurately identified. Scanning the bar code on the patient’s record, or the wristband if on the ward, ensures that the full and correct data can be transferred to the specimen label automatically. Zebra printers are a convenient way of producing the labels at any location in the hospital.

Mid Range Printers

Medication administration can be both time consuming and risky. With a mobile printer, the pharmacist can label a patient’s personal medication on the nursing floor, which saves walking time back to the pharmacy. The hospital pharmacy can also print unit-of-use bar code labels to provide a full audit trail.

View Printer Range

Blood transfusions are an area of extreme risk, where inaccurate identification can lead to potentially fatal errors. Blood bags are routinely bar-coded with their type, but when the bags are issued from the blood bank, it is important that the right blood gets to the right patient. Adding a label with the intended patient’s details, including their bar-coded ID, enables additional safety checks to be made automatically before the blood is given.

Desktop Printers

Reducing the risk of mistakes in patient treatment

Positive patient identification

It starts with the wristband that every admitted patient wears secured on a wrist. Without it, how would an unconscious person be identified? Yet often the details are incomplete, names may not be written in full, and there is always the chance that two similar names may be confused. With a unique identifier  that links to the patient’s admission record, mistaken identity is eliminated, and when it is encoded as a bar code (or in an RFID tag), then it can be read automatically and verified whenever the patient undergoes a treatment or test.

Zebra’s desktop printers and wristband media will provide fool-proof identity bands that remain with patients throughout their stay. Printed wristbands can contain text, bar codes and even digital images so that all necessary details including blood type, allergies and primary physician are immediately visible.

Nurses and clinicians scan the bar code or RFID tag on the wristband to confirm the patient’s details before treatments or tests are carried out.

Phlebotomy specimen collection: accurate labelling at the bedside avoids mix-ups

Using a handheld terminal and a mobile printer, the phlebotomist scans the patient’s wristband and prints an identification label for the blood sample as it is collected at the bedside. This greatly reduces the possibility that samples will be labelled with incorrect information or even collected from the wrong patients.

Blood transfusions: automate identity verification to cut risks

When the blood bank receives an order and issues blood to the patient, a compatibility label is printed and attached to the blood bag. Before the transfusion is administered, the bar codes on both the patient’s wristband and the compatibility label are scanned to confirm that the correct blood is being given to the correct patient.

Bedside medication delivery: make sure it’s the right drug for the right patient

When patients are admitted to hospital, the pharmacist must review any existing medication they bring with them and decide whether they can continue to use it or whether new prescriptions must be raised. Printing the label at the patient’s bedside using a mobile printer saves the pharmacist a walk back to the pharmacy and also reduces the possibility of the wrong label being applied.
Automated medication systems using bar code scanning before delivery dramatically reduce the risk of error. For example, the Veterans’ Association (VA) reduced errors by 86.2% during a trial and introduced point-of-care scanning to all 173 of its hospitals as a result.

Saving time and costs in hospital administration

Bar codes and printed labels: reduce administration time while increasing safety

When a bar-coded patient identification system is introduced into the hospital, not only does it reduce errors and the associated costs of correcting them, including potential litigation costs, but it also brings many other advantages. By moving to an automated data entry and verification system, many administration tasks are speeded up and simplified so that staff can spend more time with the patients and less time dealing with paperwork. An additional benefit is that an automated system forces changes in working habits. Processes are improved as they are redesigned to include steps such as scanning a patient’s wristband before delivering
medication or blood products, or scanning the care giver’s ID badge to give a full audit trail of the patient’s treatment.

Mobility: decentralise computer and printer access The availability of versatile handheld computers, mobile printers, and reliable wireless and network solutions has enabled many applications to be redesigned. Wireless applications improve productivity wherever staff are mobile over large areas and must respond quickly to time-critical information. The growth in the implementation of wireless networks and use of mobile workstations within hospitals has led to safer working practices and radically boosted the efficiency of staff.

Mobile printers for pharmacy staff or phlebotomists enable them to produce bar code labels at the point of care – saving them time.
Previously they would have had to sort batches of labels printed in the departments before going to see the patient. By printing the
label at the patient’s bedside, not only is the risk of error greatly reduced, but it takes less time to deliver the medication or identify
the sample. Mobile printers from Zebra can reside on the wireless network with their own IP address, communicate locally with a PC
via the short-range wireless communication protocol, Bluetooth®, or can connect via a cable.

Printer management: monitor and control printer populations Although decentralising printing has many benefits for hospital workers, IT staff may worry that it will impact on their workload. With ZebraNet™ Bridge Enterprise, Zebra’s remote printer management capability, printers distributed throughout a large hospital can be monitored and managed from anywhere on the network.