Seal Up Healthcare Package Labeling Profits

As an AIDC (automatic identification and data collection) VAR, are you aware of all the possibilities for using your technologies in the healthcare market? Most VARs targeting this vertical are either selling wireless LAN solutions or standard bar coding applications used for inventory tracking. Often the clients using these types of applications are pharmaceutical companies or healthcare facilities such as hospitals and nursing homes. But what about the suppliers of medical equipment? Surely, they too have some manual processes that could benefit from AIDC technology.

Not Your Standard Bar Code Printing Project
Lone Peak Labeling Systems (Salt Lake City) is one VAR that has been successful integrating bar code printing technology into the medical supplies market. For instance, one of Lone Peak's customers is a manufacturer of surgical devices used for arthroscopic surgery. "A similar medical supply customer of ours referred this new client to us," explained Lone Peak President Chris Appelbaum. "However, this customer wasn't looking for a traditional bar code printing application. They wanted a package labeling solution."

The customer's medical devices were being manually placed in a 24-inch plastic tray with a Tyvek lid attached. (Tyvek is made from very fine, high-density, polyethylene fibers.) A preprinted label was also manually attached to the lid. The label included such information as an image of the package's contents and warnings in several languages regarding use of the product. "The preprinted labels were too big for the lids, and the company wanted to eliminate the cost of these labels," Appelbaum said.

Save Customers Ribbon Costs
The key to this project was determining a way to print directly onto the Tyvek used for the lids. This challenge required a printer that could cut the Tyvek. More importantly though, Appelbaum needed a printer that would use its ribbon for only the 8 inches of information printed on the 24-inch lids. The printer he wanted to use, the Datamax (Orlando, FL) W-6308, didn't offer such a ribbon-saving option. However, Datamax was willing to work with him to develop such an option.

With the hardware portion of the project under development, Lone Peak began testing what the best type of ribbon would be for printing onto the Tyvek. A Datamax wax/resin blended ribbon was ultimately chosen as the best configuration for this substrate.

The final portion of the project involved determining how the Tyvek would be fed into the Datamax printer. "We had to develop the right kind of unwind dispensers [stands] to work with the large 20-inch-diameter rolls of Tyvek," Appelbaum stated. "We also had the Tyvek made with a small hole that acted as a sensor for the printer, indicating where the Tyvek should be cut."

The sales cycle for this project took eight months. During that time, Lone Peak conducted all of the ribbon and Tyvek tests, and Datamax developed the ribbon saver feature. Appelbaum said some of that time was also the result of medical clients requiring a lot of validation for any project.

No More Labels, But More Printer Sales Opportunities
Today, Lone Peak's customer has three Datamax W-6308 printers all printing directly onto Tyvek. The Tyvek is heat sealed to the containers holding the surgical devices. Appelbaum said the $7,500 project also included Teklynx (Milwaukee) LABELVIEW label design software and support.

"We eliminated the customer's label costs and the labor needed to apply the labels," he said. "Furthermore, with this new solution, the customer is able to print lot and batch numbers onto the containers, which are very important for tracking purposes."

Since Tyvek is used in virtually every form of sterile medical packaging, Appelbaum plans to sell this solution to other medical supply companies.