Recorded from the floor of HIMSS 2026 in Las Vegas, this Brand Spotlight conversation with Chris Sullivan, Global Healthcare Practice Lead at Zebra Technologies, explores how technology — from RFID drug tracking to AI-powered frontline devices — is reshaping the way hospitals deliver care, reduce waste, and protect patients. From a groundbreaking pharmacy innovation at Texas Children's Hospital to Zebra's vision for ambient intelligence at the point of care, this is a candid look at what it means to build technology for the people who actually do the work.
Summary: Recorded live from the floor of HIMSS 2026 in Las Vegas, this Brand Spotlight conversation with Chris Sullivan, Global Healthcare Practice Lead at Zebra Technologies, explores how technology — from RFID drug tracking to AI-powered frontline devices — is reshaping the way hospitals deliver care, reduce waste, and protect patients. From a groundbreaking pharmacy innovation at Texas Children's Hospital to Zebra's vision for ambient intelligence at the point of care, this is a candid look at what it means to build technology for the people who actually do the work.
At HIMSS 2026 in Las Vegas, the conversation keeps circling back to the same question: how can technology help healthcare workers spend more time with patients and less time chasing information? For Chris Sullivan, Global Healthcare Practice Lead at Zebra Technologies, that question is not hypothetical — it's the work.
In this Brand Spotlight, Marco Ciappelli connects with Chris from the conference floor to talk about what's actually happening in healthcare technology right now. Zebra Technologies, a 55-year-old company with over 10,000 employees and more than 300 healthcare-specific products, has built its reputation by designing tools not for the corner office, but for the frontline worker — the nurse, the pharmacist, the care team member who needs the right information at exactly the right moment.
One of the most compelling stories Chris shares is Zebra's partnership with Texas Children's Hospital, a world leader in pediatric oncology. The challenge: high-cost cancer medications — some exceeding a million dollars per treatment — were being lost, duplicated, or expiring before reaching patients. The solution was an RFID-based drug management system, built in partnership with a Texas software company, that now tracks medications throughout the pharmacy supply chain. The result? Millions of dollars in annual inventory savings, improved patient safety, and a model that Texas Children's is now actively sharing with hospitals in Amsterdam and beyond.
But the RFID story is just one piece of a larger picture. What Zebra calls healthcare workflow orchestration — the coordination of people, assets, and information across a complex hospital environment — is the bigger ambition. Chris describes a three-part framework: asset visibility (digitizing wheelchairs, pumps, medications, and supplies), real-time information for caregivers (through mobile computers and hands-free wearables), and operational automation (like the pharmacy RFID system). Together, these elements are designed to remove friction from the care delivery process and give clinicians back the one thing they most want: presence with their patients.
And then there's AI. Zebra has been building sensor-rich devices for years, and now those sensors — over 15 per device, capturing voice, video, and environmental data — are becoming the foundation for an AI platform built specifically for frontline workers. Chris draws a sharp distinction between AI for knowledge workers and AI for frontline workers, arguing that the needs, rules, and structures are fundamentally different. Zebra's approach is to pre-extract sensor intelligence into an open SDK with over 21 AI enablers, then package those into industry-specific blueprints that can be deployed in months rather than years.
The conversation ends where it began: with people. Chris is both a technology provider and a healthcare board member, which gives him a perspective that's rare in this industry. He understands what it means when a caregiver is interrupted. He knows that a nurse who has to stop and look something up is a nurse who isn't holding a patient's hand. That's the problem Zebra is trying to solve — not with a flashy pitch, but with 55 years of frontline experience and a clear-eyed view of what the work actually looks like.
Recorded remotely from HIMSS 2026 | Las Vegas, NV | March 9–12, 2026
This Brand Spotlight is part of ITSPmagazine's ongoing coverage of HIMSS 2026. To explore more conversations from the event, visit ITSPmagazine.com.
GUEST
Chris Sullivan
Global Healthcare Practice Lead, Zebra Technologies
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-sullivan-6135624/
RESOURCES
Zebra Technologies: https://www.zebra.com
HIMSS 2026: https://www.himssconference.com
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KEYWORDS
Chris Sullivan, Zebra Technologies, Marco Ciappelli, HIMSS 2026, healthcare technology, frontline workers, RFID, drug management, Texas Children's Hospital, AI in healthcare, workflow orchestration, mobile computing, brand spotlight, brand marketing, marketing podcast
From the HIMSS 2026 Floor: How Zebra Technologies Is Putting Intelligence in the Hands of Healthcare's Frontline | A Brand Spotlight with Chris Sullivan | HIMSS 2026
Marco Ciappelli [00:00:00]: Chris, how are you doing today? I know you are at a big event, a conference at HIMSS in Las Vegas and we hear a little bit of noise in the background. I hope you can hear me well and unfortunately I was supposed to be there, but I'm not. So you are my eyes on the floor and my ears on the floor as well. So what's going on, Chris? Good to have you on.
Chris Sullivan: Yes, thank you. Great to be here. It's exciting to be at HIMSS 2026. Really the mission of the conference is all about advancing the quality and the safety and the efficiency of healthcare. And the exciting part is that technology plays a larger and larger role in better patient care delivery. And that's something that's good for all of us. And so super inspirational to hear and spend time with customers, healthcare industry providers who are pioneering and innovating the use of technology for better patient care.
Marco Ciappelli [00:01:00]: Absolutely. And before we get into more detail about the topics and the conversation on the floor, a little bit about you, Chris, and Zebra Technologies, which is the company that you are with.
Chris Sullivan: Yes. So I lead an industry group where we focus on vertical industry solutions, which is basically capturing unmet needs of the customer industry. And pre-configuring and designing technology solutions, tailor made for the frontline workers of the industry. Zebra Technologies is a 10,000 employee company. We've been in business for 55 years. We're a market leader in many technology categories. We have thousands of patents — we've invented and pioneered new technologies across all industries. And we're really proud of the work we've been able to do in healthcare where we now have a healthcare portfolio of over 300 healthcare SKUs that are really tailor made for the healthcare industry. In addition to leading the industry group at Zebra, I'm also a board member within a large healthcare provider organization with over 25,000 people. So I'm both a customer in healthcare and a technology solution provider to healthcare.
Marco Ciappelli [00:02:30]: Yeah. That's awesome. So I know that one of the many things that you're presenting while at the conference is actually a relationship that you have with Texas Children's Hospital, where you have a program that you're helping to support the patients, optimize the inventory of medications. Can you explain a little bit more what that is? Because it sounds very, very interesting.
Chris Sullivan: Texas Children's Hospital is an amazing institution. They're a worldwide leader in children's health and specifically a worldwide leader in children's oncology treatment. And increasingly the efficacy and effectiveness of pharmaceutical medications for children's cancer is getting stronger and stronger, but the costs are going astronomically — increasingly expensive. A single drug therapy for a child can be over a million dollars. And also, if you have the wrong drug application for the wrong patient, it can have horrible consequences to patient care. So, what we know in healthcare is that despite an amazing workforce, being human, we all make mistakes. It's very easy to miss a small task as you're processing and collecting medications, administering medications. So what Texas Children's Hospital has done — it's the first of its kind and we're so proud to be able to help them in this process — they've put an RFID tracking solution that's provided by Zebra Technologies, also in partnership with a Texas software company, where we are putting RFID into the drug management process at the hospital pharmacy. And this creates both the accuracy of the medication application, so the right drug for the right patient, but it also cleans up the supply line. So imagine if you have a million dollar plus medication that gets lost or the expiration date passes — that's a very expensive thing that just occurred in the supply chain. So we've implemented this solution at Texas Children's Hospital and they're already saving in the millions of dollars of annual inventory savings. So basically we're reducing lost and waste. We're reducing instances where they're doing duplicate orders because they weren't aware that that product already was in existence inside their facility. That solution is really about safety, patient safety first, but it's about efficiency of the healthcare delivery process and economic savings. We all have heavy healthcare premiums, heavy out-of-pocket healthcare costs. When we can come together with providers and reduce the cost, reduce waste, it's really a helpful thing.
Marco Ciappelli [00:05:45]: It sure is. And I'm thinking about how we're always looking for the easy button with technology, like something that does everything for us, but then we realize that it's a tool, right? Technology is a tool. And we need to work with it. But in this case, it seems to me that this is a scalable solution that you can apply to the small medical facility, maybe to the large hospital or enterprise. Is this like a first-run test with Texas Children's Hospital, or is it expanding?
Chris Sullivan: Yes. Great point. So the first implementation was a beta implementation. It was a new innovation solution. It's been successful, it's working well now. The hospital's going to expand it to phase two of their implementation. Their plans and intent are to go broader — to more areas and more applications, more medication types and more drug families. And we're also in discussions with the hospital on getting this solution adopted and expanded across the whole industry. Texas Children's, as one example, put their staff and resources and flew to Amsterdam to speak as an innovator to other hospitals within Amsterdam and within the broader Benelux region. So we have what we call in technology speak: the proof of concept is successful, it works, and many hospitals are looking for multimillion dollar cost savings. And so we're now in the process of telling the story and we're looking at how do we make it easier and easier to implement. So we have lots of ideas on how to keep improving it.
Marco Ciappelli [00:07:20]: I love it. I love it. Listen, I started by saying that you were kind of like my ears and eyes on the floor, and of course I was joking. But I'm very curious because I was supposed to be there and I'm not. What kind of conversations are happening right now at HIMSS, and of course, how does Zebra become part of those conversations besides this case study that you're presenting? What else are you hearing and covering there?
Chris Sullivan: So the broader dialogue is around safer, faster, more efficient patient care, and how can technology help in that role? And you can't get three or four words out of your mouth before someone will throw the word AI into the discussion. What Zebra is working on is really around our healthcare workflow orchestration. If you think about a hospital, there are many workers — hundreds of different personnel types, literally hundreds of different roles in a hospital, oftentimes thousands of people in that building, lots of patients, lots of assets. It's really complex to have everything coordinated and working efficiently. Zebra has a broad solution offering that really focuses on the orchestration of that care. It is really the operational excellence to help care delivery happen on time, in a safe manner and in an accurate manner where the tasks are done accurately. We have three elements of that. We have asset visibility — we make the physical things in the hospital digital. All the wheelchairs, the pumps, the drugs, the medical supplies, the food, we digitize all that. And so now there's a visibility to all the things in the hospital. We also empower the frontline healthcare leaders with real time information about their patient, about their medical assets, about the schedule. So we empower the real time information flow with caregivers through mobile computers that they carry with them, or we have a wearable where they can have all that information available on their body where they don't even have to use their hands. We call it hands-free solutions in healthcare. And we also focus on the automation and the efficiency improvement of operations, such as the pharmacy example with RFID. In all of those elements, our company is really proud to share that we're a leader and really a first to the gate in AI solutions for the frontline workers of industry. So we have a session with a lot of customers in just a few moments where we're going to be talking about our healthcare AI frontline solutions and how we can bring intelligence and more information equipped to the healthcare caregivers. The caregivers want to be with their patients. Every time they're interrupted to look something up, to find something, to talk with a colleague — that's just an interruption away from the caregiver. It doesn't help the caregiver's mood and spirit. They want to be with the patient. And when you're a patient, you're vulnerable. You really lean on a caregiver being next to you. And so we're really proud to say that we can play a small role in helping with that process.
Marco Ciappelli [00:11:00]: Can you — I mean, first of all, I agree. Unfortunately, for personal reasons, I've had to visit the hospital quite a bit for family reasons. And you can tell — people don't want to deal with the bureaucracy. They want to be there for the patient, bring their emotions, their feelings, their comfort, and do what they can. So can you give me some examples of what AI and your solutions can do with the people on the frontline?
Chris Sullivan: Yes. So Zebra for 55 years has been a leader in frontline technologies. We are the number one provider of business-designed mobile computing solutions. And as part of that business model, we have over the last number of years increasingly put a lot of sensors into our devices. Some of our devices now have over 15 different sensors for voice, for camera, for generative AI processing, and many more. Basically there's a lot of ambient intelligence capability inherent in our devices — they can serve as the eyes and ears of a caregiver. So what I'm describing is we build an AI platform that can optimize the frontline worker's effectiveness. We equip our devices with many sensors and many different types of processing chips. And then what we've done is rather than have a customer or a software company have to dig in and mine to get that sensor intelligence information available, we've created an SDK — an open platform model where we extract the sensor information and bring that to the industry so they can use it without having to dedicate heavy resources or put a lot of time into it. So we have over 21 different AI enablers, which are just the raw intelligence off of the devices via the sensor capture. And out of those 21 enablers, we're putting together blueprints, which are use case-specific configurations. So what we're talking about with a group of industry leaders in just a few moments is: what are the biggest problems that you would like to apply AI towards? And we then have our engineering team and solution architecture team take the enablers, take the ambient intelligence information, and package them together in a ready-to-go configuration so they can be imported quickly. Outside of healthcare, we are working with one of the world's larger companies, and in a matter of three to four months, we've implemented a very effective AI blueprint solution because of that platform that we've already pre-configured. So today we have AI enablers that are working in different companies and technologies within healthcare. But tomorrow's Zebra healthcare representation will have pre-configured solutions designed specifically for the difficult-to-solve problems in healthcare. And it's important to highlight that although there's an enormous amount of attention and effort towards AI innovation globally, Zebra is really at the front of the line as it relates to AI innovation for the frontline worker. The frontline worker AI solutions are very different from what we call the knowledge worker. There's a whole different rules engine, different structures, different needs, and so we're working with industry to develop configured solutions around that.
Marco Ciappelli [00:14:00]: I love that. And I love how, with so many years in the business and thinking about how technology has changed — and it changes faster and faster — Zebra has been able to take advantage of that knowledge and experience and stay ahead of the curve. So just to finish this short piece with you, and I hope we're going to get to talk again in the future — if a company listening to this wants to get in touch with you, I'm assuming they just go on the website at Zebra.com and contact someone on the team to get started. How easy is it to work with you guys? Sometimes changing providers is a big headache for a company, but I think you make it easy, right?
Chris Sullivan: That's right. The spirit of our company is co-innovation. We love to co-innovate with other technology companies, and we also love to co-innovate with customers. So we certainly welcome those inquiries. I'll share my contact information — my email address is csullivan@zebra.com — and certainly you can find us on our webpage as well. We are in the business of trying to create value for the customer, and we can only do that with other technology companies working together with them.
Marco Ciappelli [00:16:00]: I love it. I hope people will use your email wisely and actually establish many new collaborations and partnerships in the world. So keep enjoying your time there. Have good conversations and networking. It looks like that's what's happening. And best of luck for the rest of the event, and I hope to catch up with you again.
Chris Sullivan: Thank you. That'd be fun to do another one and appreciate the time.
Marco Ciappelli: Absolutely. And everybody stay tuned for more conversations and Brand Spotlights from me, Marco Ciappelli, and Studio C60. Take care everybody.
Chris Sullivan: Thank you, Marco.