14 series Inform II meters and Epic patient armband scan issues
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Is anyone having problems with the 14xxxxxx series Inform II meters scanning Epic armbands? These are the meters with the green scan light, not the red line. We started having issues after we went live with Epic last year. These same meters read the barcode fine before then. It doesn't matter which version of software the meter has.
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We had trouble with the 14XXXXXX InformII meters until we did the software upgrade. That seemed to have fixed ours.
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What problems are you seeing? I've had various issues, anywhere from the meters having trouble reading the employee badges to having the meter misread the patient wristbands and converting the digits to letters.
Not since the last firmware upgrade. Prior to that, they didn't read Aztec symbology. We did have to mask the first two characters though.
We're scanning a linear barcode. I have some meters with the newest firmware and those have issues too. Our problems have included the meter not being able to read the barcode at all and the barcode being interpreted REALLY wrong, 18xxxxxxxxxx instead of 60xxxxxxxxxx and interpreting it as a series of letters and symbols. I saw one yesterday interpreted as ,\_.=( We referred to it as the scowling frowny face. I scanned that band at least 10 times. Twice it read correctly, 5 times it wouldn't read at all and 3 times I got that symbol interpretation. This was using 3 different meters. This mimics what I've seen from the floors.
Lara - have you been able to correct the read problems? What did you do?
We actually had the wristbands changed. Our investigation found that was the issue, not the meters. The old wristbands were of poor quality (they weren't a native barcode, they were basically a picture of a barcode, which has lousy resolution). We have seen a big improvement since.
From: Laure Niles via POCT Listserv (Groupsite) [mailto:users+1160490@poct.groupsite.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 29, 2016 9:20 AM
To: Judith Kralovic
Subject: [EXTERNAL] [POCT Listserv] Re: 14 series Inform II meters and Epic patient armband scan issues
It may be the placement of your barcode on the Epic bracelet and not the meters. We had to go through several trials when we were testing to see what worked. If the barcode is on the end of the bracelet, it does not always work. Our ID moved the barcode to the center of the bracelet so that it was not on a curve and we have not had any problems.
Judy Kralovic BSMT, ASCP
Laboratory Point of Care
Forbes Hospital
Allegheny Health Network
jkralovi@wpahs.org
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We do not have Epic but did have scanning trouble with the new Inform 2 meters that have a firmware of higher than 04.00.04. We were having trouble with our badge barcodes. I noticed the barcodes actually looked kind of blurry and were super shiny. They actually changed a setting on the printer that prints the badges and that seemed to work. If you think this may be the problem I can contact our HR department and find out what they did.
We have been having this issue as well. When I contacted Roche I was told the 14xxx series meters take a picture and if the print quality is bad it will pick up these crazy numbers. Theyrecommended I 'clean' the printers with an alcohol pad, so I did this and we are still having issues. I feel pretty sure we are not going to change the bracelets so I am at a loss as to what to do.
We have had scanning problems that still persisted after the upgrade with 13XXX meters. We are about half 13XXX that scan the 1 dimensional barcode and half 14XXX meters that will scan the 2 dimensional or Aztec barcode. the 14XXX are no problems so we are currently trying to convert to all 14XXX meters. We do see some 13XXX that will cut off numbers, but not insert strange symbols. It was the only meter on that unit doing this so our vendor representative was able to trade that 13XXX up for a 14XXX and it works much better now. Actually on his last trip we were able to isolate 3 13XXX meters that had issues and he turned all 3 in to upgrade. If you can isolate it to a single meter you could possibly get it replaced.
All of our bracelets have linear barcodes, and the 13xxxxxx meters work just fine, it is the 14xxxx that we are having issues with. The big problem is that by the time we see them in the exception que we have no way of knowing who the actual patient was, because our LIS sends the error back to Telcor that "Patient Not Found".