Barcode and barcode scanners is the most under-rated technology in healthcare.
It is undeniable that, in case of an emergency, medicine and medical tools are important to treating a patient than a barcode scanner. But it’s also true that without barcoding solution, things would either be unavailable, or mixed up, or otherwise unusable, even in a crisis.
Barcoding is an important part of the healthcare industry ecosystem, ensuring that all important inventory and assets are accounted for; that laws are followed strictly; that medicine and samples and other extremely specific items don’t get mislabeled, misused, or misapplied.
MAINTAINING INVENTORY AND ASSETS
Keeping track of where your inventory and assets are, how much of any one item you have left in stock, and maintaining a system for keeping everything safe and accounted for—this is the lifeblood of many a business, and healthcare is no exception.
Now that hospitals, doctors offices, and other healthcare providers are increasingly putting barcodes on their important inventory and assets, the chance for running out of an important material at a crucial moment is close to zero: Quality inventory management software helps create systems where scanning a barcode and finding that inventory is low will trigger an automatic reorder, automating what was once an important manual step.
Attaching barcodes to things like medicine is not just the law (more on that in a second). It’s an easy way to create a system of accountability that employees at all levels will have to respect. In this day and age, where things like opiods can be so easily abused, it’s critical to always know exactly how much medication you have, where it’s stored, and where it’s expected to be at a given time. All this information can be obtained with the scan of a single code.
IDENTIFYING PATIENTS AND THEIR NEEDS
Putting barcode labels on patients has also become a common practice in places like hospitals, where large numbers of patients requiring different levels of treatment often co-mingle and interact.
This is another situation where an error would be very easy to make, and the consequences of that error could prove deadly. By outfitting patients with wristbands with barcode labels on them, healthcare practitioners can scan the code and ensure they are treating the right patient with the right medication or practice, at the right time.
Scanners can also wirelessly and efficiently update medical records on the fly, without the need to cross check against existing records that may have not been updated. As long as professionals are given training in how to properly use barcode scanners, the management administration of medicine and patient care will rarely have mistakes.
STREAMLINING AND CREATING EFFICIENCIES
The less time that is spent manually writing down all necessary processes for treatment, the more time doctors and healthcare providers will actually have to interact with their patients, providing them with more personalized and intimate care.
Additionally, costs of reordering crucial medication or tools before there is an impending crisis will plummet as everything becomes automated.
The through line here is that the organization’s time and money becomes easier to come by with the implementation of barcode technology, and those two invaluable resources can be planned for across a doctor’s day, or a hospital’s budget, and so on.
IMPLEMENTING BARCODE AND BARCODE SCANNER TECHNOLOGY IN HEALTHCARE
As barcodes and barcode scanners become more prevalent in the healthcare industry, those who trumpet the benefits of such technology also warn that it’s not a cure-all in and of itself.
Organizations and businesses that start using barcode scanners in the context of caring for people’s health must be trained in how to properly use scanners and execute new processes. Bringing in scanners creates an entirely new workflow that must be recognized and understood; it’s not just “the old way + barcode technology.”
We provide barcoding solution for Healthcare in Dubai, UAE, Kuwait, Oman, KSA & Qatar. Visit our website Soluwise or email us at info@soluwiseme.com to learn how you can implement such systems & manage them efficiently.
