EDITORIAL
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A few weeks ago, I wasn’t feeling too hopeful about the chances of automatic drug identification becoming routine in community hospitals any time soon. I had just finished visiting a relative in the hospital and had seen a bar coded unit-dose aspirin package discarded on the floor. Wow! I had thought. Did someone match the right drug to the right patient at the right time by the right route . . . ?
No, my relative told me. “No one has scanned me here,” she said, wondering why I was asking about bar coded packaging and not her recovery. And what about her bar coded tissue box and water cup? Weren’t those cool, too?
Shortly after, I recounted the find to an audience at AIM Global’s Inside Track panel at RFID World in September. “If hospitals are not reading bar codes at the bedside, where the Institute of Medicine and FDA both urged it to happen in order to ensure the five patient rights of drug administration, how could hospitals and anyone else in the drug supply chain start using RFID?” I wondered aloud to the audience.
And, I added, if some hospitals are just barely staying in business, how could they possibly be expected to invest money they don’t have into sophisticated automatic identifier reading and tracking?
Scott Gray of GS1, one of my copanelists, however, was confident that change is occurring. Progress is being made in automatic identification, especially thanks to groups like GS1 Healthcare. “We are very close to some big accomplishments,” he gushed. “We can make a difference.”
Still, I couldn’t shake that image of the crumpled unit-dose blister. It had housed 81 mg of aspirin, packaged by McKesson. The product appeared to have been bar coded per FDA regulations, and the hospital had ordered and stocked it, all in keeping with industry moves to improve drug administration. But for whatever reason, bedside identification simply did not occur. And this fact is what left me so pessimistic.
What if the drug had been prescribed for my relative, scanned at the pharmacy or nurse station, but accidentally given to her roommate or even a floor mate, who could have had a bleeding disorder?
But now, weeks later, the progress Gray of GS1 sees happening hit home. Two other community hospitals here in Los Angeles—including the one I gave birth to two children at—have announced significant investments in bar code reading. Little Company of Mary and Torrance Memorial Medical Center are both planning to read bar codes throughout the hospital.
Are we on the verge of change? Maybe. I am hopeful that the hospital where I originally saw the discarded aspirin dose at is striving toward automatic item identification at the bedside, because of the safety and efficiency it can bring.
After all, it did appear that every item that sat on my relative’s bedside table had a bar code. Even the tissue box. Maybe we’ll find out when we get the bill.
Daphne Allen
Editor
