EBME Forums Forums Management Medical Equipment Management Bar codes

My trust is thinking about entirely re-labelling all our medical devices with bar codes.
External trusts we do work for also express a preference for bar codes on equipment on account of the belief that
(a) they are useful.
(b) they are idiot proof.

Given the basic rule of databases, "garbage in garbage out", bar codes seem perilous to me because once you put a dud number onto an item I think it would be relatively difficult to spot the error if the bar code is large and the human readable bit is tiny. The tendency would be to just assume it's ok & keep on merrily scanning rubbish into the system.

Thinking about this though, I can't see why nowdays we aren't instead using text scanner pens to read in the ordinary text on the current generation of labels

I will be looking into this possibility over the next month but wondered if any out there had either tried using this route to automating the data input.

Our current alphanumeric labels were put on over a 6 month period a few years back. 3,000 were applied. About one in 20 labels were made up wrongly and spotted before application.
About 25 of the 3,000 actually applied were subsequently found to contain errors.

I doubt those 25 errors would have been spotted with bar coding.

Marc

Marc
At PAH we generate our own barcode labels (Brother printer) which also show the asset number under the barcode, and Hospital address.

We did use a barcode wand attached to the safety tester but there we found it problematic and stopped using the wand. We still print the barcode with the intention of using them in the future when technology on med test equip catches up with Asda.

Marc,
I went down the route of barcodes to stop errors in entering asset numbers, speed etc. But.... there was a problem with compatability with the data base. The barcodes also had a checksum that was not part of the asset number but this was read off by the bar code reader in to the database entry so the old hand entered ones did not match up. The wand also put a carriage return at the end of a read which again upset the software.
So be careful what you chose and make sure it works before placing orders.
Robert