If you’ve spent any time at all in a hospital, as a patient or visitor, you are familiar with the beeping, blinking patient monitors in the rooms. Some are portable and rely 100% on batteries. Others have battery backups. All of these devices are critical to healthcare, and need people to stay on top of battery replacements. But what if that no longer was the case?
A typical patient monitor requires three AAA batteries, and needs to be replaced every 8 hours. If a hospital has 200 patient monitors, that’s 600 batteries that need replacing every shift, or 1,800 batteries every day.
Medical device manufacturers understand that this is a challenge for the healthcare industry, and have started to research wireless power as the sustainable solution. Wireless power will save healthcare workers valuable time and save the organization money.
Wireless Power Saves Healthcare Worker Time
Not even considering the expense or environmental impact of the batteries themselves, consider how much time it takes for a nurse or other healthcare worker to stop doing what they are doing, go to the supply cabinet for batteries, and return to a room to swap out those AAAs, then deliver the used batteries to a safe recycling bin? Ten minutes? Maybe more if you consider the interruption of the original task? If that’s the case, then in one hospital, nurses and other staff are using up more than 33 hours of time per day (or 2,000 minutes) replacing disposable batteries at a single hospital. That’s almost one full shift for one nurse.
The fact is, for these low power medical devices, batteries are no longer needed. Radio-frequency-based wireless power systems can automatically and safely deliver low power to multiple patient monitors throughout a building, without any user intervention.
Wireless Power Saves Hospitals Money on Labor
A registered nurse in California can make anywhere between $30 and $60 per hour. So if the healthcare systems’ workers who are replacing these batteries make $30 an hour, we’re talking about a minimum of savings of $990 per day or almost $30,000 of labor per month for the hospital by switching from batteries in those 200 monitors to a wireless power system.
What hospital doesn’t want to save $30,000 a month in labor alone?
How to Acquire Wireless Power Systems for Your Healthcare Organization
At Ossia, we run across these real world use cases for Cota Real Wireless Power all the time. The technology exists, it’s just a matter of raising awareness and creating demand.
If you develop medical devices, such as patient monitors, for healthcare systems, we encourage you to forward a link to this article to your innovations team. Start the conversation. Talk about the ROI for your customers of eliminating batteries from the hundreds or even thousands of small, low power medical devices. Talk about the inherent safety of wireless power. Then consider the benefits.
Focus on the Benefits and the ROI of Switching to Wireless Power
After you and your team identify the problems that wireless power may be able to solve in your organization, begin talking to companies like Ossia about your wireless power options, safety, and features.
Wireless power, without wires, batteries, or the need for line of sight, can solve real problems right now:
- It can free up time for overworked nurses so they can better care for patients.
- It can eliminate patient care interruptions.
- It can decrease the expenses of batteries and the labor required to manage them.
- It can even create a more reliable healthcare monitoring system.
- It can make health care organizations less vulnerable to supply chain shortages. Ossia’s wireless power technology is supply chain agnostic which utilizes well established and reliable hospital power grid.
At Ossia, we’re all about helping organizations determine the ROI of Real Wireless Power for different use cases. We look forward to hearing from you.
