In this my fourth comment on Zebra Technologies’ white paper, It’s All in the Wrist: Improving Patient Safety with Barcode Wristbands, I’d like to touch on the potential non-medical applications of barcoded patient wristbands, specifically those related to administrative and accounting record keeping, as well as those that facilitate the mundane functions such as inventory control and materials logistics.
Healthcare is, at its most basic, an essentially customer-centric industry, with few functions that do not relate directly to end services delivered to specific patients. Zebra’s extensive experience in other customer-centric industries that utilize wristbands for guest identification and security – e.g., water parks, resorts and cruise lines – positions it well to anticipate the many non-medical applications for bar-coded wristbands, and its white paper touches on a few key examples.
Having experienced in person the minor frustration of being asked as a patient which of the optional hospital meals I’d like for dinner only to be delivered something completely different at mealtime, the image of a hospital food-service worker scanning my wristband with a mobile computer that also records my dining preference and communicates it via the hospital’s wireless network to its high-volume kitchen … well … that image now has special significance to me.
And food is just one of the many non-medical services I’ve been asked to select during hospital stays. “Would you like to activate your room’s cable-TV service during your stay?” “Oh, yes please!” Just scan my wristband, record my preference and my likelihood of actually catching a favorite show is increased exponentially.
The fact is, the ever-present barcode is the essential element to one of the fastest, easiest and most accurate data-entry processes known to man, whatever the application. Logistics management is logistics management whether the product or service being tracked is destined for delivery to a medical patient during a hospital stay or to the next stage of an assembly line, and another of Zebra’s informative white papers, Increasing Profits and Productivity: Barcoding and RFID Enable Precise Asset Management, treats those more-general considerations well. Hmm, between barcoded patient wristbands and RFID tags, the next time the question, “Where’s my patient?” arises, the mobile-computer enabled answer will be an immediate, “Oh, there he is!”
So, whether the patient’s wristband is serving as a de facto charge card that is scanned to record authorization of billings for such optional services as in-room cable TV and à la carte meal selections, or is instead serving to ensure identification of the patient to safely match him or her with prescribed medications and treatments, accurate data delivery and entry is expedited.