Patient safety is a top priority in healthcare. Error prevention is a huge component of overall patient safety, and can be just as important as treatment when it comes to overall well being. As effective as your professionals are with patient care, errors can be life-threatening.
In a hospital environment, where stakes are high and lives are on the line, errors have no place. Luckily, technology developers have been on it, developing innovative solutions like barcode tracking that help prevent these life-altering errors from occurring in the first place. Here’s how barcode tracking can improve patient safety and prevent errors:
Prevent Mislabeling
Medication administration errors are at fault for over 4,000 preventable adverse drug effects in the healthcare industry annually. This is out of over 6 million prescription medication doses that are administered per year. While it is a small percentage, allowing these preventable errors to continue is careless and can be life-threatening, which is why error prevention is a must.
This doesn’t just affect pharmacies—it affects hospitals too. Medications can be mislabeled when bulk packages are broken up into units for individual patients and re-labeled. Solutions like Honeywell desktop printer PC42d can simplify the re-labeling process and improve accuracy. By ensuring each bottle is labeled correctly, these adverse effects can be prevented, and patients can be treated safely.
Improve Specimen Collection
A proper labeling system can go a long way in the name of error prevention. With this, nurses and lab technicians alike can mitigate mistakes and errors with mislabeling specimens—a leading source of medical errors in the healthcare industry.
Before, specimen labels were printed at a centrally-located printer in a lab, and later brought to the specimen for labeling. While clinicians try their best to keep everything accurate, human error is only natural, and errors can arise.
The best way to prevent this is to print labels as soon as specimens are collected. Wireless, hands-free barcode scanners like Honeywell’s latest printing solutions mounted to medical cards allow labels to be printed bedside, which increases efficiency while decreasing errors. High specimen collection rooms require wall-mountable printers.
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