By Noel C. Hodges, RPh, MBA

BY INVESTING IN BAR CODING SYSTEMS, HOSPITALS ARE MAKING STRIDES to improve patient safety and reduce medication errors at the point of administration. However, without incorporating stringent quality assurance (QA) measures into your pharmacy’s unit dose packaging operations, you run the risk of shifting the potential for error from the point of administration to the pharmacy. After all, if your pharmacy is packaging large quantities of doses, getting the right pill into the right packaging — labeled with the right bar code — can mean the difference between hundreds of accurately administered doses and hundreds of medication errors. It is important to note that as nurses become more comfortable with a bedside scanning system, they naturally become more confident that — unless their computers tell them otherwise — they are scanning the right dose.

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