Bar Code Medication Administration: A Case Study

Medication errors are a costly and frequent problem that has been occurring in those who are hospitalized, about one third of these errors occur during medication administration (Bonkowski, J., Carnes, C., Melucci, J., Mirtallo, J., Prier, B., & Reichert, E., 2013). To address this problem a new form of technology called Bar code medication administration (BCMA) has been implemented in several different health settings. Bar code medication administration is being used among a variety of hospitals across the United States. About 28% of hospitals were using the bar code medication administration technology along with the electronic medication administration record (eMAR). The purpose of these new technologies is to replace paper documentation and hand written dose …show more content…
Bar code scanning technology was developed in hope to reduce the number of medication errors and address patient safety during the actual administration of medicines. Bar code medication administration (BCMA) has been successful when combined with CPOE and eMAR and has the potential to reduce medication errors and recommend that bar coding become standard on patient identification bands and medication labels. In the clinical setting BCMA starts with the nurse scanning his/hers badge and then scan the patients wrist band bar code and then the medication bar code which verifies the 5 rights (right dose, right patient, right time, right route, and right drug) of medication administration and then documents it in the eMAR (Nelson, R., & Staggers, N., 2014). Gooder states this process is done by “Prior to administration of the medication, the nurse accesses the software in the handheld bar-coding scanner by scanning her/his