Bar code technology has been used for decades in many different industries to track items, manage data, eliminate errors, and improve efficiencies.  In manufacturing,  retailing and logistics, bar coding's successful track record and proven reliability has resulted in drastic savings in time, money and manpower.

Healthcare providers are now beginning to reap the benefits of bar code technology to help them eliminate errors, become more efficient and enhance patient safety.  A recent FDA ruling that requires the use of barcodes on human drugs and biological products found that adoption of barcode-based information systems can reduce errors as much as 85 percent.  Bar code technology is now being used in many areas throughout healthcare, including asset management, patient identification, point-of-care testing, and specimen collection.

The need for efficiency and error-reduction has also impacted the lab.  Busy labs need an efficient, error-free workflow.  Tissue specimens must be positively identified and tracked for a lab to deliver accurate and timely results.  However, many of the manual processes employed by labs can produce errors with serious implications.  The digits and letters in long accession numbers can be transposed.  Handwritten data on cassettes and slides can be illegible.  At any point in the process, a misidentification error can result in delays or mis-diagnoses.

The limited availability of qualified lab techs has also hastened the need for labs to automate and become more efficient. 

Bar coding specimens enables labs to be significantly more efficient with a