In part 3 of our interview with Dr richard Jones, we ask about the importance of barcodes.
Using barcode technology which we’re all familiar with from supermarkets can cut down the time involved with handling specimens or handling drug delivery. If you’ve got positive identification of the patient then there’s no need to hand write tubes or hand write a lot of the paperwork that happens, that’s at the patient end. At the laboratory end if the laboratory gets the right information usually the patients number then we can automate all our processes for handling the specimen reception and handling the admin side of the laboratory work. At the moment in laboratories one of the big bottle necks is in actually handling the data, the speed of the sample analysis is relatively fast but often we’re waiting to do the paperwork to get the results back to the wards. In a hospital, that matters, if you have time critical return of results, for example the four hour wait in A&E, if you’re waiting on results because it takes an hour to do the booking in you’ve wasted an hours worth of time. Similarly in general practice if we can get information for a patient more readily then we can improve the turn around of time and make life more convenient for everyone involved. From a laboratory costing point of view it does mean that we can save our staff time and we have great problems in recruiting staff and we want to use those staff to do more interesting and important jobs than simply typing work into computers, if we can automate it we can use their time much more productively.
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