Unburdening Clinicians and Harmonizing Care Delivery: A Q&A on Zebra's Orchestrated Care

Healthcare professionals today navigate immense pressure. Disconnected systems and administrative burdens often pull their focus from the critical work of patient care. At Zebra Technologies, we believe technology should lessen these burdens and empower clinicians. That’s why we developed Orchestrated Care, a new framework to help create a more connected, visible, and intelligent healthcare environment. For one leading healthcare organization, this approach helped save $14 million in a single year.

We sat down with Zebra’s Chief Nursing Informatics Officer, Kassaundra McKnight-Young to discuss this new approach and what it means for the future of patient care.

Blog team: Let’s start with the basics. What exactly is Zebra’s Orchestrated Care?

Kassaundra: Orchestrated Care represents Zebra's visionary framework for healthcare. It focuses on helping healthcare organizations produce intelligent visibility, empower their teams, and optimize their operations. The entire approach aims to connect every part of the care journey, making the delivery of care more visible and intelligent. This allows clinicians to focus on what matters most: their patients.

Blog team: What specific challenges in healthcare does this framework address?

Kassaundra: The framework directly confronts the daily hurdles that get in the way of excellent care. Many clinicians struggle with communication breakdowns due to siloed information, which create disconnected care. Such fragmented systems lead to extra administrative work that consumes valuable time. Orchestrated Care tackles these pain points with unified communication that improves collaboration and efficiency, while  reducing the risk of patient identification errors. It speaks directly to the critical issue of staff well-being and retention while helping enhance patient safety and streamline complex hospital operations.

Blog team: The framework rests on three pillars: Intelligent Visibility, Empowered Teams, and Optimized Operations. Could you explain the first one, Intelligent Visibility?

Kassaundra: Intelligent Visibility enhances patient safety by digitally connecting every patient touchpoint to mitigate risks, reduce errors, and drive consistent, high-quality care. The framework automates the flow of information to provide accurate visibility into crucial data like patient identity, specimen details, and medication administration records. For example, it helps standardize medication safety by using real-time EHR instructions to ensure the 5 Rights of Medication Administration . It also improves specimen accuracy with better identification and labeling at the bedside, which prevents inconvenient and costly redraws. It supports other Identity Enabled Workflows such as breast milk administration, blood transfusion, and smart pump programing, ensuring end-to-end integrity.

Blog team: How does the second pillar, Empowered Teams support clinicians?

Kassaundra: Empowered Teams directly supports staff well-being and effectiveness. The framework unifies communication and mobilizes essential data, including secure messaging and EHR access, onto a single, intuitive mobile device. This unified collaboration platform keeps care teams better connected and supported with features that protect staff, such as a dedicated duress button. Reducing vulnerability, cognitive overload, and enabling multi-disciplinary staff to work together in harmony facilitates decision-support and helps reduce physical strain. As a single, modern clinical device it replaces the burden of multiple devices, including pagers, scanners, consumer phones, and cameras, while integrating critical duress alert functionality and freeing clinicians from the constraints of workstations on wheels. It also helps minimize alarm fatigue by routing role-based alerts straight to the appropriate clinician’s device, allowing them to make timely decisions without constant interruptions.

Blog team: And the third pillar, Optimized Operations? What does that involve?

Kassaundra: Optimized Operations drives efficiencies and helps reduce costs by automating resource management. The framework digitizes inventory and asset tracking, which helps hospital staff slash search times for critical equipment like IV pumps and wheelchairs. Automating inventory counts and standardizing stock levels prevents stockouts and decreases waste. Simplified IT management, faster decision making, as well as detailed visibility into inventory, resources, and workflows ultimately strengthens compliance, improves facility capacity management, and lowers overall operational costs.

Blog team: This sounds powerful in theory. Do you have an example of these principles in practice?

Kassaundra: We do, and the results speak for themselves. A nationally recognized pediatric hospital faced significant gaps in asset visibility. Their pharmacy team discovered an alarming $40 million in untracked inventory, which led to inaccurate ordering and created a risk to patient care. For them, the mission always centers on ensuring the right drug reaches the right child at exactly the right moment.

To solve this challenge, we worked closely with them and one of our premier partners to implement an RFID-powered solution. Our teams embedded on-site, iterating together until the solution was finalized. This hands-on, collaborative process, which a senior pharmacy leader at the hospital described as a true partnership rather than a typical vendor relationship, ensures the technology addresses the hospital's unique challenges.

The results demonstrate the power of Optimized Operations and Intelligent Visibility. Today, the hospital has achieved 99.99% cabinet inventory accuracy and saved $14 million on critical clotting factor medications in just one year. Furthermore, they slashed medication tagging time from two minutes per item down to a remarkable seven seconds, freeing their staff to focus on higher-value tasks and patient care.

Blog team: What kind of technology powers the Orchestrated Care framework?

Kassaundra: An extensive portfolio of Zebra's healthcare technology powers this framework. This includes our purpose-built mobile computers, scanners, printers, hands-free communication badge, and specialized software. For one healthcare organization, the solution found its power from our HC50 series mobile computers, DS9908R scanners, RFD40 RFID sleds, and ZD621R RFID printers. The framework also utilizes RFID and real-time location solutions to provide the deep operational visibility that underpins the entire approach.

The Orchestrated Care framework offers a hopeful path forward, a way to build a healthcare ecosystem that works better for everyone. By connecting people, assets, and data, we can help clinicians feel more supported and give them more time to devote to their patients.

To learn more about how Zebra helps orchestrate a better care experience, visit us at the HIMSS26 Global Health Conference in Booth #2435 or explore our solutions at www.zebra.com.