Medical laptop carts are a regularly seen fixture in hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, and other medical facilities. They are essential equipment for the personnel, without which they would be unable to provide efficient caregiving.
A medical laptop cart helps caregivers provide the highest quality patient care. Discover the different features and options available, and find out how to order one today.
Why Medical Laptop Carts Are Essential Today
No matter what kind of medical facility you manage, you must offer fast, efficient caregiving with a patient-centric approach.
While new technologies offer undeniable advantages and conveniences, one of the most significant challenges in the medical industry today is ensuring that personnel perform as efficiently as possible.
According to a large-scale study, a physician spends roughly 16 minutes per patient per visit working on the EHRs, representing a significant portion of a typical workday. Even nurses, who spend more time with patients, may spend as much as 25% of their time on EHRs, documentation, paperwork, and other non-caregiving-related activities.
Letting qualified personnel spend more time with patients is critical for improving the quality of the care given and can improve patient health outcomes. One of the best tools to achieve this goal is the medical laptop cart.
A medical laptop cart allows physicians, nurses, clinicians, and other personnel to access EHRs, patient files, the facility’s local network, or the internet directly in the patient’s room.
Medical laptop carts eliminate the need to travel to and from static medical offices or dedicated computer rooms, where your staff may frequently experience high traffic and long wait times. This can increase the likelihood of clerical errors such as mistyping vital data and information.
With a medical laptop cart, your personnel can move the point of care to where it’s needed the most. Any data or information the patient relays to the caregiver can be logged immediately, which offers numerous benefits: more time spent with the patient, fewer errors, and increased patient satisfaction because they feel cared for. A 2011 study demonstrated that longer, more frequent patient-caregiver interactions contribute to an improved overall caregiving quality.
Essential Medical Cart Features
Scott-Clark Medical has over 20 years of industry experience building and engineering mobile medical carts for the healthcare industry. We understand which features are necessary for efficient and time-critical caregiving.
Ergonomic features
A nurse’s typical work shift is already strenuous, which is why all Scott-Clark Medical carts are ergonomically designed for comfort and ease of use.
They feature a small wheelbase for easy navigation through rooms, corridors, and doorways of all sizes (including tight spaces and corners), reducing the strain on your staff’s wrists, arms, shoulders, and back.
All carts feature height adjustment, allowing you to set the countertop at the best height to view the monitor and use the mouse and keyboard, regardless of your height, stature, or position (sitting or standing).
Powered models may be equipped with electric motor lifts, drawing from the onboard battery power for an even easier and more comfortable way to adjust the height. Keep in mind that bases fitted with electric motors are significantly heavier (157 lbs. on average) than standard hydraulic lift bases (11 to 44 lbs. depending on the model).
Our carts feature a fully retractable keyboard and mouse tray, ideal for supporting external keyboard and mouse combos intended for desktop computers. They can also be adjusted for use by right- or left-handed users.
This feature allows you to use the mobile laptop cart as a moving desk, reducing the health risks associated with hunching over the workstation and preventing you from using the integrated laptop keyboard, which is typically less tactile and responsive.
In addition, you will find an integrated handle into the countertop and additional handles in the back of the unit, ensuring that no matter the cart’s orientation, you always have a gripping surface within reach for comfortably moving and navigating the cart to where you need it to be.
Peripherals and accessories
Our medical laptop carts are highly flexible and customizable, allowing you to configure your fleet of workstations on wheels and tailor them to your exact needs and specifications.
Although they are intended primarily for laptops and relevant accessories, Scott-Clark Medical laptop carts support numerous computing peripherals, including:
- The vast majority of laptop PCs, regardless of brand or manufacturer
- Desktop PCs in a vertical configuration (towers)
- Thin client, thick client, and other specialized network computing terminals
- All-in-one (AIO) computers
- Additional monitors (from 15” to 24”)
- Wired or wireless keyboards and optical mice
- Computer printers, complete with printer shelf
- Wristband printers
- Document scanners
- RFID readers
- Magnetic card readers
- Barcode scanners
If you need your mobile laptop cart to feature storage capabilities, you may also order your carts with additional drawers; either general-purpose storage for small items or specialized units for medication and clinical documentation. Our drawers are also customizable. You can choose from single or dual-locking and front or side-mounted.
Additional options include convenience and quality-of-life accessories, such as tabletop extensions, medical chart holders, baskets, trash containers, sharps containers, and more.
Durable and safe materials
Our medical computer carts mostly employ durable and long-lasting materials, such as steel and aluminum. All metal surfaces are coated for additional durability, allowing them to resist scratches, dings, and other pitting, all of which can allow bacteria and other infectious agents to grow and spread.
Scott-Clark Medical carts minimize the use of plastic where possible, reserving it to parts such as handles, countertops, trays, and others. We use molded parts made of highly durable, impact-resistant plastics with large rounded edges and no sharp corners, allowing personnel to disinfect all surfaces with ease.
Conductive casters
Standard plastic casters can accumulate static electricity, creating electrostatic discharges (ESD) that potentially disrupt or damage laptops, vitals monitoring equipment, and other electronics.
For example, your laptop may sustain bugs, freeze, or crash, requiring a reboot. Lockers with biometric locks may no longer open even with the correct fingerprint. Vital sign readers may be disrupted or fail, which may leave your personnel unable to perform their jobs.
Such disruptions are not only costly in time and efficiency; they can endanger lives. With a set of conductive casters, such as those featured on Scott-Clark Medical laptop carts, you won’t have to worry about static electricity buildup.
Conductive casters are wheels with anti-static capabilities, rated for use in medical environments. They are designed to redirect static electricity back to the floor, preventing it from reaching your equipment and keeping it safe from ESDdangers.
FMCPT: A World-Class Battery Technology
A mobile workstation would be of little use if it didn’t have a reliable, long-lasting onboard power system. However, most options on the market employ outdated or impractical battery technologies, forming the weak link of most medical laptop cart solutions.
One of the most common options is the battery-style lead-acid battery. While reliable, lead-acid (Pb-acid) batteries are notoriously heavy (well over 30 lbs.) and slow to recharge (up to 10 hours for a full 0% to 100% charge).
An alternative is lithium-ion batteries (Li-ion). Although they are relatively lightweight (3 to 9 lbs., depending on the model) and possess a fast recharge time (2 to 4 hours), they are known for their relatively low capacity (rarely exceeds 6 hours) and high operating temperatures, increasing the risk of burns.
These battery technologies have drawbacks making them unable to meet the stringent standards and requirements of the healthcare industry. That is why we partnered with UltraLife Corporation to develop Flexible Mobile Cart Power Technology.
Flexible Mobile Cart Power Technology, or FMCPT, is a power supply system designed explicitly to meet the requirements of a typical healthcare facility, offering a suite of desirable, ergonomic, and highly efficient features. With FMCPT, managing your laptop carts’ power is easier than ever before.
FMCPT combines the following capabilities in a single system: LiFEPO4 battery chemistry, a dual battery system, universal power supply capabilities, hot-swapping, and SOCI II battery indicators.
LiFEPO4 battery technology
Unlike lead-acid and lithium-ion batteries, our FMCPT batteries employ lithium-iron-phosphate (LiFEPO4) battery chemistry, offering both high autonomy and fast charge times in a package that is neither heavy nor challenging to handle.
A typical URB0012 battery weighs only 8.1 lbs. and features an ergonomic design for easy installation and removal. It does not add unnecessary weight to the laptop cart, keeping it easy to move.
The 330Wh capacity of our batteries grants them an operational autonomy of 7 to 9 hours, depending on configuration and power draw.
As batteries are charged and discharged repeatedly, they progressively lose some of their maximum capacity. Our batteries possess an exceptional shelf life, with a minimum of 3,000 complete charging cycles (full charges from 0% to 100%) with at least 80% maximum retained capacity.
You also won’t have to worry about long charging times; each battery takes only 2 to 3 hours to perform a full charge.
Universal power supply
You can connect FMCPT batteries to virtually anything that requires a mobile power supply, from laptops to vitals monitoring equipment, cutting the tedium of figuring out which power supply is compatible with which peripherals.
Our batteries feature a self-discharge rate of less than 2% per month, significantly less than lead-acid batteries (approximately 5% per month) and about the same as lithium-ion.
Dual battery system
An FMCPT power supply supports up to two batteries simultaneously, offering the long-lasting power required to last well over a typical 12-hour shift.
Two fully charged FMCPT batteries can theoretically last for up to 18 hours (depending on the equipment installed and the onboard power draw) without a recharge, leaving plenty of time to spare for charging.
Hot-swapping support
FMCPT batteries are hot-swappable, allowing a cart powered with a dual battery unit to operate continuously by replacing a low-charge battery with a fully-charged one without interrupting power, making it the ideal solution for long and busy shifts.
With the right battery swapping and charging strategy, you can keep all of your medical laptop carts continuously powered from shift to shift. It’s the ideal solution for all of your power management needs.
Hassle-free battery indicators
Our batteries come with SOCI II state of charge indicators, featuring a large, full-color backlit display, easy-to-read symbols, and a remaining charge counter using hours and minutes in place of percentage values.
SOCI II indicators are a step above standard battery indicators, which are typically small and inconvenient to read. With SOCI II indicators, your nursing personnel no longer have to rely on ambiguous values and guess how much a specific battery can last, improving workflow and overall efficiency.
Order Scott-Clark Medical Laptop Carts Now
Scott-Clark Medical is an industry leader that constantly develops and innovates in the field of mobile medical carts. Our patented technologies and top-quality products are here to let you fulfill your mission as a caregiving organization: to help you help others. Call us now at (512) 756-7300 if you have any questions about our products or services.
FAQ
Can I choose the number of batteries on my medical laptop cart?
If you order a medical cart outfitted with our patented FMCPT battery system, you may choose models supporting one or two batteries.
Do you offer a warranty on FMCPT batteries?
Our URB0012 batteries are covered by a 5-year warranty, and URS0010 power systems by a 2-year warranty. See this page for more information.
Can I retrofit FMCPT batteries on my existing fleet?
Yes. We offer a retrofit and refurbishment program to help hospitals and caregiving facilities nationwide upgrade to our patented technologies without the hassle of replacing the entire fleet of mobile carts.