As the healthcare industry moves forward in its efforts to control costs and insure patient safety, the most consistent recommendation to emerge for achieving comprehensive reform is the integration of automated-identification technologies into the care giving environment. Perhaps the most critical element to this process reform is the labeling of medical products down to the unit-of-use level.

Unit-of-use identification, or source marking of products enables broad-based cost containment measures by providing the ability to determine actual utilization by a patient, generate exact billing for goods used and update hospital inventory in real-time. Source marking at an individual level also provides system safeguards to insure the correct product is being administered to the correct patient, as well as providing efficient tracking of products in the event of defect and recall.

In the past, the lack of usable �real estate� on small and individual packages made labeling with traditional linear bar codes problematic. With the advent of the �next generation bar codes� space constraints are no longer an obstacle. One of these new symbologies is Data Matrix.

Reprinted with Permission from HIBCC