We were talking the other day with a hospital in the Northwest, very advanced in most of their technology, but frustrated by some of the fundamentals with their mobile workstation fleet (which had been provided by a well-respected competitor of ours).

The root issue?   Insufficient battery life. 

Digging further, nobody from a vendor standpoint was focusing on the real goals and needs of the organization.   Think about it:  a typical hospital with three shifts a day, needing to run each cart for 18 hours, would also need 18 hours of charging time for each.   That’s 36 hours per day.   Now, we’ve had the privilege to work with some of the most efficient hospitals in the U.S. over the years, but have yet to see one who could extract 36 hours out of a 24-hour day.

As one solution, we’ve had a new power product in development for quite some time, which we finally launched a few days ago. Based on conversations with dozens of customers across the country, this new battery is designed to only need 10 minutes of charge time for every hour of use (a total of 1-3 hours per day, under normal conditions).

The goal is for hospitals to get well beyond 18 hours of usage from each cart during the day, with room to spare.  And looking at some of the workflow and process challenges within the IT department, we also designed the battery for a total lifespan that’s up to 10x longer than current solutions – so instead of taking carts out of commission and the labor-intensive process of switching the batteries out every six months, the workflow can now continue uninterruped for 2,000 cycles or beyond.

Take a look at the new ST7 LiFe Battery solution