The significance of barcode technology in healthcare is growing with advances in scanning. While numerous people suppose of barcodes when they hear about retail, barcodes also profit hospitals and other healthcare installations. Learn how the role of barcode technology impacts healthcare and its benefits for a healthcare association.
Also read: How Barcode Technology Improves the Retail Industry
What’s the Role of Barcode Technology?
Barcode is a published series of resemblant bars or lines of varying extents and alphanumeric characters used for entering data into a computer system. The bars are generally black on a white background, and their range and volume vary according to operation.
Operations of Barcodes in Healthcare
Medicine Identification and Medication Management
Drug operation is a grueling job that relies on the “five rights”- Right Patient, Right drug, Right Cure, Right Time, and Right Route of Administration. The role of barcode technology drug verification at the bedside allows nursers to record drug administration automatically. A study set up that barcode operation averted about 90,000 medical errors each time and reduced the mortality rate by 20 percent. In another study, barcodes were set up to reduce drug administration errors by 82 percent.
Surgical Instrument Identification
Barcodes can be used to identify the instruments and supplies in accoutrements for surgical procedures. Barcodes on instruments and surgical accoutrement may be used to assure compliance with surgeons’ preferences for what their accoutrements contain. Using barcodes to track what is, and what isn’t, used regularly may allow hospitals to optimize tackle contents for each surgeon. This provides room to reduce costs since surgeons’ preferences may change over time. Sterilized instruments can also be uniquely linked using barcodes on surgical instruments.
Patient Identification
The role of barcode technology can help prevent medical errors by making accurate and dependable information readily available at the point of care. During the patient’s stay, any other patient care exertion can be tracked, like monitoring specifics, infusions, instance collection, and so forth. Electronic barcoding ensures correct patient identification throughout the testing process, including test ordering and reporting, instance collection, and analysis.
Wristbands with barcodes that contain the information of the case’s medical record or visit number and any other identifiers have been proven effective in furnishing proper patient care. In addition to wristbands, barcode scanners and printers are used to confirm patient identification.
Blood Transfusion and Laboratory Samples
Opinion and treatment can involve handling natural factors similar as blood. Did you know that the FDA requires blood and blood substances for transfusion to have barcodes? That’s why they created this regulation. In lab testing, barcodes help technicians track samples to insure accurate results.
Benefits of Enforcing Barcode Scanners in your Healthcare Facility
Accuracy
When used appropriately, barcode technology can ameliorate your record keeping accuracy. Reliable scanners and barcodes keep your data correct and easy to pierce. Barcode Medication Administration ( BCMA) is an inventory control system that uses barcodes to help human errors in the distribution of tradition specifics at hospitals.
BCMA technology automates the process of verification by surveying the barcode on the drug and the patient identification wristband, therefore aiding the nursers in attesting the ‘five rights’ of drug administration right case, right drug, right cure, right route, and the right time.
Effectiveness
With a single checkup, a barcode reader can access patient or stock records. This technology saves time your staff would else spend looking through documents to find what they need.
Inventory Control
Inventory control is a complex process in the healthcare assiduity to deal with, as it consumes a lot of time. Barcodes have helped the assiduity in managing its inventory anyhow of where they’re located. As a result, the right accoutrements and outfit are available whenever and wherever they’re demanded. Barcode scanning of products speeds up there-order process as well.
The system is enabled to automatically re-order products when they reach a specific inventory position (surgical implements, drugs, outfit, etc.).
Patient Privacy
Barcode technology can have privacy protections structured in to cover patient information. With the right software, you can stay HIPAA- biddable and defend your association’s data.
Future of Barcoding in Healthcare
Given barcoding’s history as a mature dependable technology, barcoding will continue to be implemented in healthcare settings to ameliorate the quality of patient care. Radio frequency identification (RFID) is anticipated to be a future contender for barcoding. Nonetheless, barcoding will continue to play a prominent part and will probably unite with RFID to form a hybrid system. In this regard, barcoding (1- D and 2- D) will continue to have advantages over RFID for the following two reasons-
- Barcoding is cheaper than RFID solutions.
- Barcode technology is immaculately suited for tasks in which a human being is stationary and objects are moving(e.g. blood sample collection and labeling).
Barcoding technology in healthcare will ultimately begin to shift over to the use of 2- D symbologies to accommodate size restrictions and the growing need for large quantities of data. As mobile phones are used more and more, this is formerly getting a reality and will be a vital step towards the development of mHealth.
Also read: How Is Barcode Technology Used in Stock Control?
Summing Up
There’s constant change in the medical assiduity, from new treatments and specifics to new legislation. In numerous ways, the role of barcode technology operation in healthcare has been constant. Barcode results boost effectiveness and accuracy in everyday processes. Barcodes enable quick and accurate data entry for the healthcare assiduity, allowing time to be spent adding edge rather of manually entering data. By allowing interpreters to concentrate more on their cases, barcode technology improves effectiveness, patient safety, and quality of patient care.
