BETHLEHEM, PA. Company's IV pump has bar-code scanner to curb medical errors

Bar codes will automatically program doses of medicine.
PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- Scan the nurse's badge. Beep. Scan the patient's armband. Beep. Scan the drug label. Beep.
With new technology for avoiding medical errors, starting a patient on intravenous medication sounds like a grocery checkout line.
A Bethlehem company's latest intravenous pump uses a supermarket-style bar-code scanner to check a list of "rights" nurses can't afford to get wrong: right patient, right drug, right dose, right route, right time.
Proposal
Every medication given in a hospital will soon have to carry a bar code under proposed federal Food and Drug Administration rules expected to be finalized early next year for a three-year phase-in.
It's part of an effort to curb medical mistakes that the Institute of Medicine estimates contribute to up to 98,000 deaths a year. Medication errors alone kill an estimated 7,000 hospitalized patients annually.
Bethlehem-based B. Braun USA says it is in the forefront of a race to bring bar codes to health care with a scanning intravenous pump designed to eliminate some of the most common -- and most dangerous -- medication errors.
George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C., has bought 200 of the B. Braun IV pumps and expects to have the scanning system in full use in a few months.
In essence, said Barbara Jacobs, the hospital's director of critical care, "The pump will automatically stop me from going in the room and giving Mr. Johnson's medications to Mr. Smith."
The technology has become a focus of efforts to cut down on medical mistakes, said Allen Vaida, executive director of the nonprofit Institute for Safe Medication Practices.
"Bar coding has picked up as a piece of technology that many hospitals and even ambulatory sites are putting in," Vaida said, adding that many companies are racing to bring such systems to market.
Testing system
For example, the University of Wisconsin Hospital is testing a bar code scanning system McKesson Automation Inc. and Alaris Medical Systems Inc. are jointly developing to reduce intravenous medication errors, he said.
B. Braun USA, a subsidiary of the privately held German company B. Braun, hopes to make the technology a major revenue producer. The U.S. subsidiary employs about 4,500 of B. Braun's 28,000 employees worldwide, including about 1,500 at its headquarters in Bethlehem and its plant in Allentown.
The new IV pumps bypass many potential errors by using the bar code readings to automatically program dosages.
"You usually have to go through between eight and 15 steps to program a pump," said Sheila Kempf, a B. Braun vice president and former intensive care nurse. And they are particularly risky steps.
"If someone is supposed to get two cc's per hour, you have to put in two, point, zero. If they press the point, but don't press it hard enough, then press zero, now it says 20. That's way off," Kempf said.
The risks multiply when nurses are overworked, GWU Hospital's Jacobs said.
"There's a tremendous amount of division and multiplication nurses do right now in operating the pump. They say 'death by decimal points,"' Jacobs said.
The new pumps are computerized to input the figures direct from the bar codes. The nurse reads the medication and the dosage on the pump's LED screen and confirms that the information is correct.
Then and only then, Kempf said, "You press 'run.'"