Okay, yet another example of how bedside medication and barcodes is clearly needed in every hospital now! This recent article includes a brief mention of how the Veterans Affairs health system implements bedside barcoding:
You’ll see in a VA hospital a ritual that I guess you can see at some (other) places, but it’s virtually still just in the VA. A nurse is giving a med to a patient. She has a barcode on a bracelet explaining who she is. So the med has a barcode, the patient has a barcode, she scans herself, she scans the medicines, she scans the patient. If it’s the wrong patient, the wrong med, the wrong dose, the wrong time, she’s prevented by the computer system from making that medical error. That turns out to be huge.
That comment is from Phillip Longman who, according to the article, is senior research fellow in the economic growth program of the New America Foundation and author of the book, “Best Care Anywhere,” about the VA system. The point he makes that I think is relevant to this discussion is that in the 1990s the VA had a poor reputation for medical errors. Now, he says, they are having better results than anyone.
Filed under: GS1 Tagged: | Bar code, GS1, Hospital, Patient safety
