Hospital Medication Mistakes Reduced By Use of Bar Codes: Study

The use of bar code technology on prescription drugs could cut the number of adverse drug reactions caused by medication mistakes in half and completely eliminated mistakes due to misreading of doctors’ handwriting, according to the results of a recent study. 

Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston found computer coded labels on hospital patients and drugs prevented nurses from giving the wrong medication, helped ensure that they received vital drugs in a timely fashion and reduced the overall number of injuries due to prescription errors. The results of the study was published on May 6 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

As part of the study, patients were given bar-coded wristbands and medications were labeled with bar codes. Nurses were required to scan both the wrist band and the medications to make sure that the patients were getting the right drugs. In addition, scanning the bar codes updated the pharmacists’ patient medical records, so that the pharmacist was alerted when the patient needed their prescription refilled, or when they had not been given a dosage in a timely fashion. The bar codes contained the type of medication prescribed, dosage, and other important information, which was entered electronically by the prescribing doctor.

Researchers looked at 6,723 drug administrations before the procedure was put into place, and 7,318 medication administrations after the bar codes were utilized. They found that when no bar code technology was used, medication errors occurred about 11.5% of the time, with 3.1% resulting in adverse drug events.

When the bar-codes were employed, the overall number of errors dropped to 6.8%, a reduction of 44.4%. Adverse events fell to 1.6%, a drop of 50.8%. Errors due to transcription mistakes, where the pharmacist misread or misunderstood the doctor’s prescription, were completely eliminated by bar coding. Without bar-coding, transcription mistakes occurred 6.1% of the time.

According to a 2006 report by the National Academies of Science’s Institute of Medicine, there are about 1.5 million medication errors every year that result in injuries. These mistakes are largely preventable and could be caused by a doctor prescribing the medication incorrectly, the pharmacy filling the wrong dosage or by nurses dispensing a different patient’s drugs.