RFID – An Alternative to Barcodes at the Bedside?

Barcoding has become established in several industries as an inexpensive and reliable automatic identification technology that can overcome human error in capturing and validating information. In the decades since its creation, barcoding has become highly standardized, resulting in lower costs and greater accessibility. Indeed, word processors now can produce barcodes, and many inexpensive printers print barcodes on labels. Most current barcode scanners autodiscriminate between 12 and 15 symbologies and all their variants without requiring configuration or programming and, when programming is required, these same barcodes scanners can be programmed for specific uses by simply scanning the appropriate barcodes within the scanner’s user manual.

Despite these significant developments, the adoption of barcoding has been slower in the healthcare sector than the retail and manufacturing sectors. Barcoding can capture and prevent errors during medication administration and is now finding its way from the bedside into support operations within the hospital. A study from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston showed that the number of near misses detected by barcode scanning at the bed side could be cut in half by implementing barcode verification of medications at dispensing or compounding (Cooley, 2008).

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