Healthcare and Barcodes: What's the link?

It is vital to ensure the safety of patients in healthcare. Doctors, nurses and the administration itself take special care in providing better standards of safety to their patients. But no matter how hard one tries, there is always the possibility of human error.

Thankfully, advancements in digital technology such as cloud systems for management, barcodes and RFID have greatly improved the level of care and safety of patients. Barcodes specifically have played an essential role in doing so. Let’s see how this technology helped the healthcare sector overall.

More focus on patient care by Seamless Integration

The purpose of technology should be to improve and simplify lives. If one takes too much time to learn how these new technologies function, their purpose would be defeated. In our case, the focal point of healthcare professionals should be the primary care of patients, not learning about barcode technology.

That’s where barcodes step in: they are extremely easy to use and integrate well with the existing management system software and infrastructure implemented in healthcare. This means that once it has been implemented, professionals can focus primarily on providing quality healthcare to patients.

The Associated barcode hardware is easy and intuitive to use

Laser printers are used to barcode machines in order to track them and many healthcare organizations are using thermal printers for tagging their machines with barcodes. These machines are costly; therefore, it is important to automate tracking for them for inventory and other administrative purposes.

The same goes for smaller machines as well as medicines in a pharmacy. The tasks involved with barcodes are purely intuitive — like changing cartridges and using scanners for doing inventory. Moreover, barcode printers are portable and easy to carry, making them efficient and user-friendly.

Barcodes and people

We have covered how barcodes are used to track inventory like machines and medical equipment. But what about tracking the patients themselves? To get everyone on board with the idea of tracking, it is important to rally the key stakeholders, including the staff, around it. That is why when many hospitals decide to implement wristbands for better patient tracking, get their staff to try it first.

The wrist band used to track patients, when worn by the staff allows the healthcare institution to get real time feedback about the wrist-band, whether it is comfortable and durable. It allows the hospital to evaluate the decision of introducing the technology for patients.

When the staff, including nurses and some of the doctors, sees the effectiveness and durability of the bands even after they operated, took showers, washed hands and did other daily chores, they will be willing to support the decision of adopting the technology.

This “testing” is crucial to ensure that the wrist bands perform their function effectively for patients. This will help to keep track of the patient’s identity and record (as well as their health) as accurately and consistently as possible.

There is little doubt that barcode technology is beneficial for healthcare and that implementing this technology is fairly easy and highly convenient. To implement this technology in your hospital, you can log on to GoCodes Total Asset Management or call at 1-800-513-5778 for further information.