In an Internet of Things (IoT) approach to health care Cardinal Health announced the opening of its Healthcare Supply Chain Innovation Lab, a research and development facility dedicated to reducing the $5 billion in waste in the health care devices supply chain.

The new, 20,000 sq. ft. lab located in Concord, Mass., will serve as a hub for Cardinal Health to explore innovative approaches, such as smart sensors and near-field communication, to bring creative, acute care-centered technologies to some of health care’s most challenging issues.

“IoT has gained significant traction in health care,” said Jean-Claude Saghbini, vice president and general manager for Cardinal Health Inventory Management Solutions. “While much of healthcare’s IoT focus has centered on patient monitoring applications, we believe that medical devices are ripe for an IoT approach. Building on existing automated cloud-based supply chain solutions, Cardinal Health’s vision is to create a level of efficiency and connectivity that will transform the healthcare supply chain from a source of savings into a strategic asset that can significantly reduce the total cost of care.”

The new center comprises hardware design, solutions testing laboratories as well as a customer experience center, where visitors can interact with integrated solutions and provide feedback on technologies and services in the development stages. The team is committed to expanding its offerings to bring additional benefits to health care providers and aims to develop new solutions that will accelerate the transfer and analysis of big data and support real-time decision making on issues such as consumption and impending product expiration.

Cardinal Health continues to rapidly expand its automated inventory management offerings and solutions for challenging processes related to procedural areas, such as the operating room. Its inventory management solutions are currently used to track products in more than 2,700 hospital locations and 68 distribution locations in 41 countries.