Before administration of a medication, the nurse scans both the armband and a barcode on the medication. 11 Upon admission to the hospital, all patients are given a barcode wristband. The use of barcode technology has been identified as a way of improving the administration phase of medication use by confirming a patient's medication at bedside to ensure the 5 rights of medication administration – the correct drug, dose, time, route, and patient. 7 Reviews of the literature note a lack of consistent data to substantiate claims of effectiveness and improvement of patient outcomes, especially for commercially developed systems.
HIT has been cited as particularly difficult to study due to the complexities of systems, variability within medical facilities, and the lack of controls during implementation. The assumption is that such systems reduce the impact of ADEs, but the specifics of how they change the profile of errors remains somewhat obscure. Barcode medication administration (BCMA) technology was developed to decrease administration errors, and many hospitals utilize computerized physician order entry (CPOE) systems to decrease the number of prescription errors. Specifically, the electronic medication administration record (eMAR) was created to improve communication between the nurses and pharmacists and reduce transcription errors. 2ĭescription of the 5 phases of the medication-use process.īy focusing on error profiles within the medication-use process, developers have designed new types of health information technology (HIT) to reduce the number and severity of ADEs. 2 Those at the administration phase are more likely to reach the patient and therefore cause harm. Research has found that approximately one-third of ADEs take place in the initial prescription phase and another third occur at the administration phase. Some medications will then require (5) further monitoring (see Figure 1). Next is (2) transcription of the medication into a medication administration record (MAR), (3) dispensing by the pharmacy, and (4) administration of the medication to the patient. It begins with (1) prescribing or writing a medication order, often by a medical doctor. These phases describe the process by which a medication is given to a patient in the hospital. To systematically examine ADEs, researchers designated “medication-use phases” to better classify types of errors. A large percentage of ADEs were found to be caused by human error, and close to half of those that were most serious were found to be preventable. 6 Research on ADEs in the mid-1990s revealed the breadth of the problem, and it also offered some hope for improvement. 2–4 Furthermore, ADEs are estimated to cost approximately $3.5 billion in the United States every year. 2, 4, 5 Although many of these errors do not reach the patient or cause harm, studies have estimated that up to 18% of patients may be affected by a serious ADE. 1–3 Studies suggest that ADEs affect almost half of all hospitalized patients or possibly more. ADEs occur with alarming frequency and are among the most common errors that affect patients in hospitals in the United States.
Any help would be much appreciated.Adverse drug events (ADEs) refer to errors that occur as a result of a mistake in delivering a drug to a patient, and they are a well-known problem in the medical community. Unfortunately we are unable to persuade our client to use a different type of barcode. Whilst this was once true, now the ITF-14 specs state that it can be reduced down to 25% for non automated scanning.ĭoes anyone know of a barcode plugin for illustrator that will be able to set such a barcode? We will need to set hundreds so manually setting the human readable characters isn't really an option (also we wouldn't want to make any mistakes). I have tried to set it in Artpro however get the same issue and the warning message "ITF magnification should be between 62.5% and 120%". I have contacted Esko and they say they will perhaps add it as a "wish" in the next release - which is clearly no good to us as we need to set them now. We have been asked by a client to set ITF-14 barcodes at 25%, we've tried setting it using Esko's Dynamic Barcode plugin, however because it is going to such a small magnification it has an issue with the human readable characters (they overlap).