Drugs used in preparing intravenous (IV) bags currently use linear barcodes to store the National Drug Center number but, amazing as it seems, a clinician may need to type that number into a keyboard in order to determine the dosage, expiry date etc. Fresenius Kabi have recently announced that they will start putting GS1-Data matrix codes on their pharmaceutical products. The additional data on the codes can even let a clinician know if the drug has been recalled. In surveys around 20% of IV bag preparations contain errors so streamlining the process using 2-D codes should help the process.
