Titled “Bar Code Label Requirements for Human Drug Products and Biological Products,” the measure is designed to protect patients from preventable medication errors, and to reduce the cost of health care.
An FDA press release reports that the final rule applies to most drug manufacturers, repackers, relabelers, private-label distributors, and blood establishments. New medications covered by the rule will have to include bar codes within 60 days of their approval. Most previously approved medicines and all blood and blood products will have to comply within two years.
The FDA rule calls for linear bar codes on most prescription drugs and on certain over-the-counter drugs commonly used in hospitals. Each bar code will have to include, at a minimum, the drug’s National Drug Code number. That information will be encoded within the bar code. Companies may also voluntarily include lot number and expiration date.
The rule requires the use of machine-readable information on container labels of blood and blood components intended for transfusion. These labels contain FDA-approved, machine-readable symbols identifying the collecting facility, the lot number relating to the donor, the product code, and the donor’s blood group and type.
In use, bar codes on drugs could work with a bar-code scanning system and computerized database. When a patient is admitted to a hospital, the facility gives the patient a bar-coded identification bracelet to link the patient to his or her computerized medical record.
Bar-code scanners or readers at the hospital could be linked to the computer system of electronic medical records. Before a health care worker administers a drug, the patient’s bar code would be scanned. That allows a computer to access the patient’s computerized medical record. The worker then scans the drug’s bar code to inform the computer which drug is being administered.
The computer then matches the patient’s medical record to the scanned drug to ensure it matches. If not, the computer sends an error message, and the health care worker would investigate if the cause of the problem is the wrong patient, dose of drug, wrong drug, wrong time to administer the drug, or if the patient’s chart has been updated and the prescribed medication has changed. For more information, visit www.fda.gov.
