For more than 20 years, the same doctor served as my general practitioner, and during those years the medical records he maintained on me were all on paper and grew from a few pages in a single folder to an impressively-thick stack of pages bound in that same folder. He not only knew my medical history, blood type and medication allergies, he knew me. And then he retired.
I started over with a new GP, and I still consider her my doctor today. She too knows my medical history, or at least the last few years of it, plus my blood type and medication allergies. I have absolute faith in her competence in the art and science of medicine. If I didn’t, she would not be “my doctor.”
But as the practice of medicine becomes more complicated and more highly regulated, her role as my primary-care physician is increasingly dominated by administrative challenges, including increases in the record keeping and reporting required by insurers and governmental agencies. She may be super-human when it comes to medical diagnoses and prescription of treatments, but she is only human when executing the administrative roles of her profession. After all, she went to medical, not management, school.
The medical profession is made up of countless physicians like her, many of whom we first meet when admitted for critical care in hospitals, environments that magnify the administrative challenges faced by doctors to a much grander scale than those faced by my GP. Ditto their record-keeping and reporting requirements. They too are “only human” when it comes to administrative challenges – the same challenges that include ensuring that their prescription of a certain dosage of a specific medication for a certain patient actually translates into delivery of that precise dosage of that exact medication to that specific patient. In short, procedural errors in the delivery of prescribed treatments occur far more regularly than do substantive errors of medical diagnoses.
So what’s a busy medical caregiver to do, especially those who practice amid the remarkable volumes of patients seen by major hospitals? Studies have repeatedly established that barcoding is the single-most-effective answer to prevention of errors in the delivery of medical care. The simple expedient alone of identifying each patient with a wristband imprinted with a unique barcode has been proven to eliminate 42% of such errors, and when combined with complimenting patient-identification protocol, can improve the accuracy of delivery of medical care even more.
Zebra Technologies is the industry leader in barcoded patient-identification wristbands, offering solutions appropriate to every category of medical patient and practice. From the hospital admissions office to its lab, pharmacy, and blood bank, and finally to a patient’s bedside, Zebra wristbands remain intact and readable, delivering improved barcode read rates, as well as increases patient safety. But Zebra delivers more than barcode print solutions – Zebra delivers comprehensive, coordinated solutions that deliver benefits throughout entire enterprises via application software that automates back-office as well as clinical processes. For more information, see Zebra Technologies’ Healthcare Printing Solutions Healthcare Printing Solutions.