Updated June 14, 2014.

So much of medical care today involves expensive technology. For sure, most of it does what we hope it will: make patient care better, safer, cleaner, and/or faster.

But lest we get lost in the glitz of high-tech's beeps and blinking lights, remember, we're here for answers, and sometimes the answer is blissfully low-tech.

This Is Not Sexy

Some of the most prevalent hassles in health care are not sexy.

You won't find them as a plot theme on your favorite medical drama on television.

But you will find them, everyday, everywhere, in real life hospitals.

Take catheter storage for example. It matters to real nurses. Fail to manage it, and it will manage you. 

Every minute of a nurse's shift matters. They comfort, heal, and save. So when we make them work in a system that forces them to hunt for medical supplies, everyone loses. Consider:

• The patient who needs the catheter must wait while the nurse is gone in search of it.
• Other patients loose because anything that they need is delayed because the nurse is hunting.
• The hospital operations budget loses because administrators will have to overcompensate for this kind of inefficiency.

Catheter Storage Solved

There are a couple of issues that complicate catheter storage. For one, they have been historically difficult to keep at the point of care. Their sizing makes it tough to find a convenient spot to stow them.

Also, they come in different lengths, so when they are stashed together, even when the nurse finds them he or she must waste time sorting through the bundle to find the right size.

The ideal solution is to have the right supply in the right quantity stored in the right place. For many medical supplies, the ideal location is within the nurse's arm's reach at the patient's bedside.

Paladin Medical Products has launched a solution that meets these needs. It starts with a decades-old product called the equipment rail. The extruded aluminum rail mounts horizontally on the walls of patient rooms, critical care units, exam rooms, or emergency triage and treatment rooms, etc., to provide a place to mount medical supplies. 

Then Paladin provides a machined aluminum bracket that attaches to the back of a medical device, medical supply, or medical storage container. The bracket then clamps onto the rail.

And that's the extent of your "technology."  Who says the Industrial Age is over? Paladin Medical Products proves that often useful ideas and solutions don't need to be expensive, or require expensive power to run them. 

Their latest storage accessory is a catheter container. It is an upright bin with three vertical compartments. Each compartment is intended to hold a different size catheter type. So nurses no longer need to hunt for the right size. Instead, they reach and grab immediately the size they need.

The container also has a clear, see-through front panel so that people can readily fit this into their lean or 5S methodologies. To be able to tell, with a quick glance, if your supply inventory is low, is essential to efficiency. Catheters are refilled before size inventories are depleted at the bedside, saving valuable patient care time.

A Responsive and Adaptable System

There are so many more storage accessories in the Paladin product line. The horizontal equipment rail provides a foundation for many varieties of bins, trays, hooks, and hangers to accommodate the many shapes and sizes of medical supplies and devices.

The brackets are designed to be "quick-release." Nurses don't need to call facility maintenance staff when they find that a bin would serve them more efficiently if it were located in a different place along the wall-mounted rail. The nurse simply moves it. At that moment.

How's that for technology?