A DECADE AGO, distribution expert Michael Marks told an audience of healthcare executives that the state of bar coding in hospitals consisted of “laser beams on one end and hand-written sticky notes on the other.” It was an accurate assessment of the convoluted healthcare logistics environment from the managing partner of the Melbourne, Fla.-based Indian River Consulting Group.

Flash forward 10 years and the change is obvious. Hospitals have embraced automation for many core clinical and administrative functions and personnel are more comfortable using new technology today. Yet for some reason, bar coding and radio frequency identification system adoption remains curiously stuck in neutral, Marks said.

“It isn’t that much different now than it was then,” he said. “The technology is there, but no one is doing anything about it. It’s a solution in search of a problem.”

Bruce Wray, director of marketing for St. Paul, Minn.-based Computype, agrees that bar code adoption “still has a long way to go” in hospitals, but “many departments within many hospitals have adopted some form of bar code identification.”

The trouble, as Wray sees it, is with how the technology has been adopted.

“Automatic identification systems tend to be ‘islands of automation’ and there is often no master plan to integrate bar code technology consistently throughout the facility,” he said. “While it’s fair to say that most hospitals and clinical labs use bar coding to some degree, strong emphasis must be placed on ‘to some degree.’”

Meanwhile, asset-tracking systems need to evolve before hospitals commit to full-scale implementation, Wray added.

“While it hasn’t reached its full potential, I don’t think you’ll see a lot of advancements in bar codes, such as new symbologies or giant leaps in bar code scanning technology,” he said. “The development of two-dimensional symbologies and scanners over the past several years has made it possible to reliably encode a tremendous amount of information in a very limited space. I think that has been the most significant recent leap forward in bar codes.”