Barcodes Saving Lives
Why Bar Codes? Bar codes save lives. AMA studies report that 20% of prescribed medications taken by, or administered to, patients were of the wrong dosage. An estimated seven thousand deaths every year are attributed to medication dispensing errors. Nearly 90% of these could have been prevented by the use of bar codes on unit doses at the time of administration. The FDA recognizes the demonstrated benefits of bar codes and has mandated bar codes on all over-the-counter and prescription medications in hospitals, including unit doses.
Total Bar Code Quality With so much depending on the printed bar code on unit doses, quality is a critical issue. An out-of-spec bar code may be an unreadable bar code. And a bar code with improperly formatted data may be worse than no bar code at all! Yet many companies invest significant amounts of money in implementing bar code labeling – and do it wrong.
Here’s why you should only entrust your barcode printing needs to Quint-