Adaptability is a necessity in healthcare. Every clinician has a wide variety of daily tasks and responsibilities to ensure quality patient care. As such, data collection tools need to be just as adaptable as their users. With the Xenon 1902h, such adaptability is not only possible, it is also easy to implement and change to support varied clinician workflows.

A typical standard scanner provides a loud, audible “beep” to indicate a “good read.” While this kind of operator feedback is widely understood, it can be highly disruptive in certain environments; say, during night time operations in an inpatient recovery ward. In these environments, maintaining patient comfort while keeping clinicians productive can be a challenge. That is why our Enhanced Xenon 1902h includes a quick-toggle mode we call Patient Do-Not-Disturb. In this mode, audible feedback is disabled and replaced by additional visual display options that provide positive status indication to the clinician—without disturbing resting patients. Select from multiple silent status indication options, including pulsing of the scanning aimer/imager and/or activation of the back-mounted status LEDs.

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Best-in-class healthcare organizations are looking to cordless scanners for their next deployment, but not just for the obvious reasons. The latest generation of cordless healthcare scanners bring with them unique technologies that can truly transform common clinician workflows, making nurse’s more productive and focused, while enabling a higher degree of patient safety.

Advantage 1 (The Obvious One): Freedom of movement— nurses need to go to the barcode
Freedom of movement around patients, family members, and expensive equipment—particularly in congested patient wards or ICUs—is a continued challenge for today’s clinician. As more and more technology is packed into the modern-day patient room, free space comes at a premium. Tethering a scanner to a wall-mounted computer or to a workstation-on-wheels (WoW) cart just does not meet the needs of today’ on-the-move nurse. Not every monitor, IV bag, infusion pump, or oxygen line with a barcode is going to be located next to the workstation, so taking the scanner to the barcode is a necessity.

Advantage 2: Free up the nurse’s hands with presentation scanning
A capability currently found only in the cordless Xenon healthcare scanners, presentation mode scanning is dramatically faster than point-and shoot scanning. Eliminating the need to aim and pull the trigger on each scan, presentation mode scanning instead allows the clinician to “present” the items to the scanner. Xenon’s high performance sensors automatically detect objects in its field of view and rapidly scans regardless of angle, orientation, symbology or background material.

Advantage 3: Easier to clean
Cables and cords found in hospital rooms—especially those that come in contact with the floor, hands, bedding, or the patient—carry the most potential for germs. Not only is the cable subject to exposure to bacteria and viruses, it can also be the most difficult component to clean. According to the CDC, one in 25 hospital patients will be infected with a healthcare-associated infection during their hospital stay.1 Going cordless not only saves time on common tasks, but should also reduce the possibility of these infections occurring. Continue reading »

A creative group of nurses are helping Honeywell uncover better ways to use barcode printers and scanners at the bedside. In the past, it was common to see barcode scanners mounted on workstation-on-wheel (WoW) carts behind the display and out of the way. It made perfect sense at a time when reading barcodes was a new and relatively uncommon task. Today, the frequency of reading barcodes at the bedside has dramatically increased and—with Meaningful Use Stage 2—this trend will continue. Nurses using Honeywell’s Xenon cordless barcode scanner quickly discovered that mounting it in an elevated, forward-facing orientation allowed them to fully benefit from the scanner’s “presentation mode” feature. Just like the built-in scanners found at the grocery store, presentation mode scanning is faster because it eliminates the need to squeeze the trigger, and frees up the second hand for quickly handling items.

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Setting up a new scanner has historically meant using a programming manual and scanning various barcodes to customize the device as you needed. Luckily for us, Honeywell has developed an easy to use application to quickly configure their scanners called EZConfig.

Honeywell’s EZConfig for Scanning 4.1 has been improved to facilitate fast and easy barcode scanner configurations with an improved, user-friendly interface. Some new features include: port agnostic automatic device discovery, expanded interface support, configuration history with undo functionality, and simplified data formatting – all from an HTML-5 platform independent browser-based utility.

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The Honeywell Xenon series are already some of the most aggressive and capable full 2D imagers on the market today and they continue to get better! With the new firmware update for the Xenon 1900 and the cordless 1902, a host of enhancements have been added to these scanners including additional functionally and improved bar code reading.

The new firmware update includes:

Decoder improvements – Improved reading on Data Matrix bar codes with the ability to decode Data Matrix ECC 0, 50, 80, 100, and 140.  Mirrored Data Matrix codes are also now automatically handled by the scanner.

ColorFusion Image Processing Capability – New support for processing images with a variety of image filters for all Xenon 1900/1902 Color and Color-Capable models. Filters include:  Infinity filter, Compensation, Pixel depth, Edge sharpen, Histogram stretch, Inverse filter, Noise reduction, Image rotate, JPEG image quality, Gamma correction, Image cropping ,Pixel skip, Document image filter, Blur image, and Histogram ship.

IBM Support – New enable/disable commands specified by IBM to USB and RS-485 to enable/disable: GS1, GS1 expanded, GS1 composites, PDF, MaxiCode, OCR, Data Matrix, Aztec, QR, and code 49.

Cordless enhancements – A new batch mode option to retain data until the user sends or scans a clear command.

Data formatting updates – Added ability to insert a string and to send data up to, but not including, a string.

All new Xenon scanners will be shipping with the new firmware but updating your current unit is a simple download. You can add all the new features in just a few minutes. For more information on the Xenon series or the new firmware update feel free to contact us at Barcodes Inc.