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Healthcare IT

Singapore hospital integrates medical labelling

By Jianggan Li | 5 July 2011

Many hospitals are increasingly relying on barcode labelling for patients, medication and specimen for correct identification and minimising medication errors.

Andrew Chew, Intermec’s Senior Director for Global Printer Development, uses the example of a in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) mix-up involving a high profile fertility centre in Singapore to explain that the impacts are sometimes beyond saving lives and malpractice lawsuits. Singapore’s Minister for Health at the time, Khaw Boon Wan, was quoted as saying that the incident not only hurt the reputation of the centre’s IVF facility, but that it also had negative implications on Singapore’s reputation as a regional medical hub.

“Accurate sample identification and management processes need to begin at the patient bedside: The greater the time or distance between when a sample is drawn and when it is identified, the greater the chance for error,” Chew explains.

Integrating specimen labelling with patient identification and medication labelling, as Chew notes, requires an umbrella ‘back-end’ system to ensure different systems and processes communicate with each other in real time. He cautions that in this case, checks and balances need to be put in place due to the high risk nature of the industry.

Khoo Teck Puat Hospital, a 550 bed tertiary facility which opened in Singapore last year, has integrated one of these systems into their day-to-day operations. When a patient enters the hospital, there is a patient file electronically developed and uploaded onto the network and accessible to the relevant staff on the case; when a blood sample is taken, staff would print a label at the bedside from a mobile printer and, using the printed barcode, assign it to this file.

As specimens move around the hospital, they are scanned in and out of the various departments so they can be individually tracked. Chew says this not only reduces error, but streamlines the workflow of the healthcare enterprise as a whole.

While technology can provide significant benefits in reducing, if not eliminating, human errors, Chew adds that the other way of minimising human errors’ impacts is by ‘limiting the amount of options that staff can choose from when adding to patient files’.

“It is widely accepted that the key human errors are miscommunication, incorrect input into a system, or decisions made based on inadequate information,” he explains. “When you have a system that not only uses drop-down boxes for key fields, but also checks to identify clashes and errors, the opportunity for miscommunication or incorrect information input can be virtually removed.”

Chew says that cost is still a challenge for pervasive implementation of bedside printing and labelling. However, as the focus on patient safety has been gaining the ground, the benefits of technologies which reduce errors are becoming more attractive.

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