Penn Researchers Find Hospital Bar Codes Not a Perfect Prescription
JULY 1, 2008
A study by sociologist Ross Koppel, PhD, Affiliate Member, Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and colleagues published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics
Association, found practical problems in bar code systems delivering
medications to patients leading nurses to develop work-arounds that
often undermined the system's safeguards. Koppel said that by following
eight key recommendations, four of the hospitals where the study was
conducted were able to greatly reduce errors. An article about the study was featured in The Philadelphia Inquirer.
