Locate and Recover Lost Healthcare Devices with SMG3Rx EDGE PinPoint

It is no secret that healthcare environments are busy. Hospitals are near constantly filled with urgent activity coupled with frequent interdepartmental movement of clinicians and other staff alike, making it easy to lose or misplace clinical mobile devices. When you need to respond quickly to emergencies or to a patient or clinician need, sometimes you just drop everything and go, and you might leave behind a handheld mobile computer or tablet.

However, this creates serious headaches and problems when that device is needed again, especially in an urgent response or when it’s time to get back to more routine matters. Inevitably, a clinician, staff member or IT must track down and locate the device, and, if it can’t be found, it can be a dangerous cybersecurity risk, and it often has to be replaced.

This is where having a pinpoint device tracking and locating system can be a huge help. At SMG3Rx, where we specialize in turnkey clinical mobility solutions, we listened to healthcare providers who often struggled with missing devices, and we created a proven device-locating solution called EDGE PinPoint.

How SMG3Rx EDGE PinPoint Works to Locate Lost or Missing Devices

EDGE PinPoint is a cloud-based solution powered by Zebra Device Tracker that works with Zebra Android healthcare mobile devices to provide near-instant visibility into the location and status of any mobile computer or tablet.

Our solution detects and pinpoints the location of a device using its Wi-Fi connection as well as map-based locating, Bluetooth® Low Energy (BLE) proximity indicators, remote device ringing, and a Geiger-counter-style proximity meter. If a device is connected to your network, EDGE PinPoint will find it using maps of your facility, departments, and other locations. If you need guidance as you physically retrieve it, our proximity indicators and meters as well as device ringing will help you get to the precise location.

However, you might wonder what happens if your device battery is running low and it powers off, disconnecting it from your network. Fortunately, you can still locate the device if its battery is equipped with a Bluetooth LE beacon.

Zebra’s healthcare-grade mobile devices, such as the HC50 and TC52-HC touch mobile computer, come with battery-based secondary BLE beacons. These allow a mobile computer’s location to be detected by a seeking device, even if the lost device’s battery has reached a critically low state or is now powered off. The BLE beacon can continue to transmit a ping for up to several days, so you typically have plenty of time to track down and locate a powered off device that isn’t connected anymore.

Major Benefits for Hospitals and Other Healthcare Facilities 

At hospitals and other healthcare facilities where providers have implemented our EDGE clinical mobility platform and activated EDGE PinPoint, countless hours of searching for devices and thousands of dollars in expensive replacement have been saved. It’s also a helpful boost for clinical workflows, since missing devices can be located quickly, which helps everyone stay connected and avoid disruptions to urgent clinical collaboration or patient care delivery.

EDGE PinPoint is also a huge time and money saver for IT. In addition to making it vastly easier to track and locate devices, it autonomously identifies and flags devices to be found, and it identifies at-risk devices through machine learning. It can even notify nearby users of other devices when they’re near a lost device, to create “crowd sourcing” that helps quickly locate missing devices. Since it also offers the ability to ring a misplaced device, it effectively creates a virtual “tether” to help prevent long-term or permanent device losses.

If you already use our EDGE clinical mobility platform and managed services, which provide device deployment, single sign-on, device check-ins and check-outs, role-based device configuration, and lifecycle management, you can easily add EDGE PinPoint to your solution. You simply purchase a one-year, three-year or five-year software license, and you get access to all of PinPoint’s capabilities. There is no need to implement an entirely new or separate system.

With our EDGE managed services, you also get access to a web portal for IT administrators and clinical managers, so they can see reports of device performance, status, health, and location, and you can even request end-of-day email reports.

Additionally, since EDGE and EDGE PinPoint operate in the cloud, there’s no need to purchase a server, additional access points, or infrastructure. Every server instance tracks up to 100,000 devices across up to 5,000 sites, so it’s a massively scalable solution. One subscription provides everything you need to configure, deploy, and maintain your clinical devices—from technical support to managed services.

Learn More and Get Starting with SMG3Rx EDGE PinPoint

If you’re looking for an easier way to locate lost or missing healthcare mobile devices, EDGE PinPoint is the solution for you. To learn more about EDGE PinPoint and our EDGE clinical mobility managed services alongside Zebra healthcare solutions, contact our team today by filling out the form below.

From networking to handhelds, our technical experts would be glad to review your needs and determine how our services and solutions can help you deliver better clinical mobility with easier management for IT.