The Ups and Downs of Unit-Dose Packaging
In the United States, it is estimated that on average a hospital patient is subject to at least one medication error per day, and most of these medication errors occur at the drug prescribing or administrating stages. How prevalent are drug administration errors? In a 2002 study, 36 different healthcare facilities were observed, and it was found that the percentage of drug administration errors was 11% excluding doses administered outside of scheduled time (ie., wrong-time errors). Given these results, it should come as no surprise that several groups and agencies are focusing their efforts on reducing or eliminating steps that can contribute to the error rate in the drug administration process.
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Ensuring bar code quality is a must!
According to the Institute for Safe Medications Practices, the FDA's bar-code rule ended a long time standoff between manufacturers and hospitals. Basically, manufacturers were reluctant to invest in systems to produce bar coded unit-dose packages if hospitals didn't have bedside scanning equipment. On the other hand, hospitals did not want to invest in bedside scanning systems unless most medications were available in bar coded unit doses. However, April 26, 2006, the date the bar-code rule came into effect, marked the end of this deadlock since the ruling now requires printing of bar codes on all prescription products and selected OTC items used in hospitals.
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Questions & Answers
This new section features some of the most frequent questions we encounter in the field of Vision Inspection.
How necessary is expandable inspection capabilities?
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Tradeshow Announcement
What you can expect to see from Optel Vision.
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Web Sightings
Industry news and views from informative and interesting web sites from around the globe. From bar codes to blister packs and more...
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