A new RTLS App for Hospital launched!

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RTLS App for Hospital

INDTRAC for Hospital earlier was available only as browser App. Now it is available as native App in Google Play store. While you still can continue to use the browser App, the new native App enhances the experience by an order of magnitude.

The App also adds  a few very important functionalities that were missing in the web version.

Examples include :
1. Adding custom reminder : Medical equipment need regular maintenance and AMC renewal. Keeping track of different dates for so many equipment can be error-prone if not tedious. The App lets you feed those details into the system for each equipment once. Automatic reminder will be sent to your team at a regularity you choose. It will ensure that team won’t miss any of those renewal windows.

2. Uploading the AMC reports. : The app lets you scan the report and upload it so that others can use it as reference.

3. The App works in unison with other INDTRAC Apps which means admin function can be segregated based on the service one administers. For example to monitor only the ambient temperatures and humidity, you can use only the INDTRAC Sensor where as other RTLS functionalities can be availed in the INDTRAC Hospital App.

More details are available at our product page. The App also can be downloaded from Google Play store. You are most welcome to download and try yourself. However to appreciate full power of the App, you would need the sensors and wireless readers to be fixed in your premise. We help our customers to run the pilots before full deployment.

Did you know QR code can cut your shipment errors and returns drastically?

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QR Code for shipment trackingIf you are a factory owner or goods producers, this may be for you. Small businesses often struggle with shipment errors and returns. Manual processes and human error can lead to picking the wrong items, sending to incorrect addresses, or damaged goods arriving. These issues not only cost money in return shipping and processing fees but also damage customer satisfaction.

QR code can make tracking your shipment accurate and super-easy

A smartphone App is the lightest solution you can imagine. Using the App, you can generate QR code for each shipment and also use the same app to track them from anywhere. Each time someone scans, the location and time is recorded in the App. That way anyone in your office can track the item in almost near real-time.

  • Unique Identification: Each product or package would have a unique QR code attached. This code encodes information like the product ID, order number or any other fields you like to include.
  • Scanning for Accuracy: Warehouse staff can scan the QR code with a smartphone during picking and packing. This ensures the correct item is selected and placed in the appropriate package.
  • Real-Time Tracking: More scan adds more real-time updates. This transparency helps identify potential delays or delivery exceptions.

A 2021 survey by Zebra Technologies revealed that 83% of businesses using QR codes reported a decrease in picking errors.

A 2020 study by Deloitte found that real-time shipment tracking with QR codes reduced shipment returns by 15%.

Incidentally INDTRAC QR App does exactly what is needed. What’s more? We will help you in case you need any assistance in setting up at no cost to you.

Cost Savings through QR Code-Based Asset Tracking

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QR Code based Asset inventory
In the ever-evolving landscape of business operations, efficiency and cost-effectiveness are paramount. Many companies are turning to innovative solutions like QR code-based asset tracking to streamline processes and reduce operational costs. Let’s explore how adopting this technology has enabled businesses across various sectors to achieve significant savings.

Case Study 1: Manufacturing Sector

Company Profile:
A medium-sized manufacturing firm with multiple production facilities and extensive machinery.

Challenge:
The company faced challenges in tracking the usage and maintenance schedules of machinery across different sites. Manual record-keeping led to discrepancies, delays in maintenance, and increased downtime.

Solution:
Implemented a QR code-based asset tracking system integrated with their existing maintenance management software. Each machine was tagged with a QR code linked to a digital profile containing maintenance logs, service schedules, and operational data.

Results:

  • Reduced Downtime: By monitoring maintenance needs in real-time, the company minimized unplanned downtime by 30%, leading to increased productivity.
  • Improved Maintenance Efficiency: Scheduled maintenance became more efficient, reducing overall maintenance costs by 20% annually.
  • Inventory Optimization: Better tracking of spare parts and consumables lowered inventory costs by 15%.

Case Study 2: Logistics and Transportation

Company Profile:
A logistics company specializing in warehousing and distribution services.

Challenge:
Tracking and managing a vast inventory of goods across multiple warehouses and during transit was cumbersome and prone to errors. This led to inefficiencies in order fulfillment and increased operational costs.

Solution:
Deployed a QR code-based inventory management system that enabled real-time tracking from warehouse to delivery.

Results:

  • Enhanced Inventory Accuracy: Reduced inventory discrepancies by 25%, minimizing stockouts and overstock situations.
  • Optimized Route Planning: Improved asset visibility allowed for optimized route planning, reducing fuel consumption and transportation costs by 15%.
  • Faster Order Processing: Streamlined order picking and fulfillment processes increased operational efficiency, leading to faster turnaround times and improved customer satisfaction.

Case Study 3: Healthcare Sector

Company Profile:
A network of hospitals and clinics facing challenges in managing medical equipment and supplies.

Challenge:
Ensuring timely availability and tracking the usage of medical equipment and supplies across different healthcare facilities was critical for patient care and operational efficiency.

Solution:
Implemented a QR code-based asset tracking system integrated with their inventory management software and patient records system.

Results:

  • Improved Asset Utilization: Optimized usage of medical equipment reduced unnecessary purchases and extended equipment lifespan, resulting in cost savings of 18%.
  • Enhanced Patient Care: Timely availability of critical supplies improved patient care outcomes and reduced emergency procurement costs.
  • Regulatory Compliance: Maintained compliance with healthcare regulations by tracking equipment maintenance and usage history seamlessly.

Conclusion

Across diverse industries, adopting QR code-based asset tracking systems has proven instrumental in driving operational efficiency and achieving substantial cost savings. Whether in manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, or beyond, companies have reaped the benefits of real-time visibility, improved inventory management, and streamlined operations. By leveraging technology to enhance asset tracking capabilities, businesses not only reduce costs but also position themselves for sustained growth and competitiveness in today’s dynamic marketplace.

Ready to transform your operations and unlock cost-saving opportunities? Try INDTRAC QR App for free. Call us for any help you need.

Your Cold Chain just got smarter with real-time Tracking and enhanced views

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We are thrilled to announce a major update to INDTRAC Sensor, your go-to app for real-time cold chain monitoring! This exciting new release brings a suite of powerful features designed to elevate your cold chain management experience to the next level.

Unprecedented Visibility with Real-Time Tracking

INDTRAC Sensor now offers comprehensive real-time tracking of temperature, humidity, and GPS location for your Reefer containers. Imagine having a bird’s-eye view of your entire cold chain operation, knowing exactly where your shipments are and the precise environmental conditions they’re experiencing. This unparalleled level of insight empowers you to make informed decisions and ensure product integrity every step of the way.

Enhanced Views for Every Need

We understand that different users require different perspectives. INDTRAC Sensor now offers a variety of enhanced views to cater to your specific needs:

Indoor Map View:  Visualise all your sensors fixed in all the cold chambers on the indoor map, see their current status and historical charts – all in real time.
Container View: This gives full list of Reefer Containers. Select a container, find where the container is on the Google Map now. Also read current temperature and humidity. It also tells you how recent the sensor data is.
Sensor View: Get a quick and concise overview of all your sensors, identifying potential issues or areas requiring attention.

Effortless Management at Your Fingertips

INDTRAC Sensor now features in-app administration for both sensors and Reefer containers. Manage sensor configurations, set up alerts, and configure your Reefer containers directly from the app, saving you valuable time and streamlining your workflow.

INDTRAC Sensor : Your Trusted Partner in Cold Chain Excellence

With this latest update, INDTRAC Sensor solidifies its position as the most comprehensive and user-friendly cold chain monitoring solution available. We’re committed to providing you with the tools you need to optimize your operations, minimize risk, and ensure the highest quality standards for your temperature-sensitive products.

Ready to Experience the INDTRAC Sensor Advantage?

Download the latest version of INDTRAC Sensor today and discover a new era of cold chain control. We’re confident that these powerful new features will help you achieve greater efficiency, peace of mind, and unwavering confidence in your cold chain operations.

Digitalise your manual asset inventory now

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If you are manually keeping track of your assets inventory or using barcodes to keep track in old-fashioned way, we have good news for you.

INDTRAC App now lets you import all your barcodes and use the App to track those assets. And when you decide to move on from old barcodes to the new world of QR Codes, INDTRAC App will keep them ready in advance.

Simply download the codes, print them in your printer at whatever size you wish and start fixing them on your assets. Your inventory would be QR-code-ized in no time. You do not need barcode reader, computer or anything. Your staff use their smartphones alone to manage your assets now! Total freedom from being stuck to a computer or even a place.

The App is all that you need to manage your assets from anywhere in the world!

Just download the App, register your site and voila, your digital asset inventory is ready.

And if you need a minor customization of the App, or you need customization of the QR Code, just call us or email us. We will deliver it to you in no time.

So what are you waiting for? Start your warehouse revolution now!

Continuous temperature monitoring in cold storage chain

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cold storage room

Temperature Monitoring in Cold Storage: Challenges

Data Gaps and Inaccessibility: Traditional temperature monitoring systems often rely on manual data recording or single-point sensors. This can lead to data gaps, inaccurate readings, and delayed response to temperature fluctuations. Additionally, accessing real-time data remotely can be cumbersome and require specialized software, hindering responsiveness and decision-making.

Scalability and Integration: Cold storage facilities need to monitor vast areas with multiple temperature zones. Implementing traditional systems across such a large scale can be costly and complex, requiring extensive wiring and maintenance. Integration with existing infrastructure and data management systems can also pose challenges.

Opportunities:

IoT and Wireless Solutions: The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) presents opportunities for real-time, remote monitoring with wireless sensors and networks. These solutions can provide data from multiple points within the storage facility, enabling comprehensive temperature mapping and proactive alerts.

Even if your cold storage runs at -30ºC, we have the right sensor for you. It's not temperature alone, we can help you monitor humidity or air quality in a closed space continuously, be it in hospital chamber or cold storage chamber.

AI-powered Analytics and Predictive Maintenance: By leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, cold storage facilities can analyze temperature data to predict potential issues and optimize energy consumption.

How INDTRAC helps?

With INDTRAC Sensor App, cold chambers can now collect and monitor temperature data wirelessly in real time. The App lets you see current data, watch trend over last two days, set custom thresholds to monitor and generate daily reports from anywhere. INDTRAC works with BLE sensors from all leading vendors so that you can choose the right sensor for you. The solution is designed keeping in mind users in Europe as well as Asia. You can buy sensors from local vendor and use INDTRAC App to monitor your facility.

Call INDTRAC today and see how IOT based continuous monitoring revolutionizes cold storage management.

Custom QR Code design for enterprise

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Recently we received a request where the customer needed to track hundred thousands of assets under its inventory. They added a few of constraints.  One of them was that the tags had to withstand extreme weather. The environmental temperature ranged above normal range of temperature. It also had to be water-proof.

They had another requirement, the tag had to have some specific text and design. We felt that this may be a need for many enterprises struggling to inventory their assets with a really low budget but with a specific design requirement. The simplest of them would be that the tag show the logo of the enterprise.

To cater to these needs, we launched our bulk QR Code design service where INDTRAC will deliver finished QR Code tags with custom design and size to the customer. Needless to add, these tags would be usable with INDTRAC QR App for tracking those assets.

As usual our promise for the low cost of ownership for the customer holds for this service as well.

AI Doctor is almost ready

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For a hospital’s managing director, most crucial and expensive resource is doctors’ bandwidth. Imagine an ailing patient entering the hospital for the first time.  In US, a GP would visit him and run the first-level diagnosis. Based on his analysis a line of treatment would be indicated or the patient would be referred to a specialist.

In India, the patient would go to the the front desk and they will guide to the appropriate department based on patient’s answers.

In both cases, It is humanly impossible to remember about vast number of medical issues with correlated symptoms. This means that initial diagnosis could take a little while, sometimes at the cost of patient’s time and patience.

Now imagine that front-desk is equipped with doctor-grade AI or the GP is assisted with doctor-grade AI, like ChatGPT, trained on vast corpus of medical data and researches. It is somewhat like all the specialists are standing behind the GP to help him reach correct diagnosis at the quickest time possible.
With the help from AI, pin-pointing the right department would be faster for the front-desk assistant. AI can help the GP handle a lot more load with higher accuracy.

Medical Generalist AI

With faster initial diagnosis, hospital’s productivity increases by magnitude. The fact is technology already has reached this level. Commercialization may take another year for the regulation bodies to create guard-rails for the use of such technology ubiquitously. But advanced hospitals may start utilizing the generalist AI service much earlier.

DeepMind Med-PaLM

Particularly two companies are at the forefront now. Google’s DeepMind is almost ready with Med-PaLM. Med-PaLM is a multi-modal large language model (LLM) trained on vast medical data. In the recent report it claims to be 90% accurate in its responses. It’s repertoire is vast if not comprehensive. It can understand Clinical Languages. It can analyze images (radiology etc). It is claimed to speak Genomics too!

OpenEvidence

And there is OpenEvidence, promoted by Mayo Clinic. Theirs’ also is a multi-modal large language model but with an extra chip on its shoulder. Unlike other LLMs like ChatGPT, it is trained with real-time data. With real-time data streaming into it, it would be up-to-date about latest medical findings on every sector –or that’s what they claim when the service will be commercially ready. It could be very soon since they recently claimed[2] it to score above 90% in United States Medical Licensing Examination.

OpenEvidence AI claims to become the First AI in History to Score Above 90% on the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE)

Opportunity or Threat?

GPOnline finds that England needed nearly 7,400 more full-time GPs to manage the patient care. According to a 2021 WHO report, India was just above the 2006 standard of 22.8 healthcare workers per 10,000 population. With professional doctor-grade generalist AI at disposal of every hospital, relief is not going to be quantitative alone, it can add qualitative improvements in patient diagnosis in terms of reducing diagnostic time, improving accuracy and potentially reducing number of tests for the patient.

With a professional team always monitoring the model’s answers and fine-tuning the model’s learning, the improvement will be continuous and so will be the efficacy of the system.
Following the current trend, entire service most likely will be made available as SaaS for the hospitals and clinics. SaaS model also will help bringing incremental cost of adoption down to an affordable basis.

In summary, it looks like that generalist medical AI is going to bring paradigm-shift in patient care in not a very distant future. How pervasive the adoption would be though would depend on a hospital’s patient-care economics.

Read more

1.DeepMind announces Med-PaLM
2.First AI in History to Score Above 90%
3.OpenEvidence official site
4. Med-PaLM official page

Understanding asset tag technologies

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Indoor asset tracking is coming to mainstream now. Whether in hospital, or in warehouse, people are realizing that there are certain benefits that they cannot ignore any more in their business context.

But before you adopt it, would you not like to understand what it takes to implement? Of course there is this software called Real Time Location System (RTLS) but what about the tags? This is an attempt to make it simpler for you to decide.

Many Tag technologies

Every asset tracking system requires tags to be fixed on your assets. Now there are different tag technologies, like RFID, LoRA, BLE, UWB etc.

RFID can be both passive and active. Passive RFID tags do not have battery and therefore do not transmit by itself. RFID readers in vicinity sends search packets and the passive tags respond to them (they are passive after all!). Active Tags regularly send data which nearby Reader/Gateway captures. Sometimes people use Active RFID interchangeably with BLE or Bluetooth Low Energy.

So which tag should you choose?

The plain answer is it depends. For example, not all RTLS vendors support all tag types. In most cases vendors sell tags and other hardware as part of the full package solution. Other important factors depend on what you actually need.
Passive RFID tags cost the least among all of them but RFID readers some times miss reading passive RFID tags. In fact reading consistency is about 90%-95% for RFID readers with UHF antenna (UHF is the fastest among all the RFID system).

On the other hand UHF RFID readers are very expensive. Compared to that BLE devices cost magnitude cheaper. BLE is more accurate as well. UWB is the newest of the technologies and the technology is capable of precisely location an asset within a few centimeters. Hospitals traditionally went with RFID tags, many with vendor-proprietary active RFID solution. Proprietary solution makes you locked-in with vendor.

Incidentally INDTRAC RTLS works with almost all different hardware and tags and lets you change your tag system in future. For example, let’s say you decided to adopt BLE now. Later if you decide to upgrade to UWB, you can do that with INDTRAC.

Now coming back to relative benefits and costs. Typically UWB is the costliest solution at this point but offers most precise location articulation.

Here is a simple comparison chart for all the tags for quick reckoning.

Feature RFID BLE LoRa UWB
Technology Radio Frequency Identification Bluetooth Low Energy Long Range Ultra Wide Band
Range Short (~ 20 feet) Short (~ 40 feet) Very Long (~ 1 mile) Long (~ 100 meters)
Accuracy Low (~ 10 feet) Medium (~ 2 feet) Low (~ 100 feet) High (~ 1 inch)
Power Consumption Low Low Low Medium
Tag Cost $0.10 – $1.00 $0.50 – $5.00 $1.00 – $10.00 $5.00 – $50.00

Summary

In summary, if you follow traditional solutions, you would use RFID. If accuracy is paramount for you, you would have to choose UWB. But in most cases, BLE serves both ends. It also offers relatively long battery life for tags. Gateways also do not cost as much as UHF RFID. They are also easier to install or replace. INDTRAC supports both Indian brands as well as international brands like Zebra , Impinj or INGICS .

Why hospitals need relook at equipment service model

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A hospital’s visible operation is about its patients and its doctors and other care-giving staff. But behind a smooth healthcare service, equally crucial is break-free running of plethora of medical equipment. Breakdown of a single equipment can severely impact hospital’s schedule and therefore operational cost.

To appreciate this better, imagine a patient, scheduled for a non-trivial medical intervention, arrives the hospital. Typically the staff needs 30 minutes to make the patient ready. The doctor arrives 20 minutes before the scheduled slot and asks his team to check the readiness of the instruments. The team while checking found a critical instrument faulty. Administrative team now have to replace the equipment but back-office finds that standby equipment has missed service window and is out of service contract now.

How can the hospital owner avoid such costly oversight?

Solution 1:

An asset and service inventory that is always updated, can help the hospital manager avoid such surprises.

1. Back office can maintain a service schedule and contract documents for all assets online.

2. Hospital management can review it in its operational meeting every week and ensure that no equipment misses the service schedule and no impending service contract renewal go unchecked.

But this can add a lot of book keeping overhead on the team and management. How can we make it painless for the team?

Solution 2:

Use a tool like INDTRAC service reminder.

INDTRAC App lets you add you reminder for every aspect related to service or contract renewal. All one needs is add the details of service date, periodicity (monthly, yearly, half-yearly etc..) of every asset service date and every contract. The App will start sending daily reminders to the administrative team days in advance for every service and contract date so that you do not miss any of them.

Interesting thing is this reminder service can be used independent of indoor tracking service.

That means you do not need BLE (Blutooth Low Energy) or RFID to use this service. All that is needed, is to download the INDTRAC QR App and start using it to manage all assets and service reminders.

Additional Benefits

Medcity News has compiled few important data that can help a hospital owner to decide why this is important.

According to them,

  • The average medical service contract took 3-4 months to activate, with greater than 75% of contracts (relatively) low dollar.
  • 63% of the contracts had different prices for the exact same model.
  • Variability ranged from 40% to 60% in contract costs on the same asset and identical entitlements.

References : Why healthcare needs a new model for equipment service

With the App-driven approach, all the service and contract data would be digitally available and analyzable at any time from one’s phone. That would enable centralised review of all service contracts. Centralised planning and negotiations in advance for service contracts can drastically reduce the variability and cost surprises for the hospital management.