While Googling bar-code medication-administration (BCMA), one results page included an interesting article: “Barcode medication administration demons…” You bet I clicked on that one. However, because my display window was not opened wide enough,...

Seems my grandkids are hearing the same sound bites from their parents that my kids heard from theirs. Yesterday my always neat-and-tidy daughter Alison interrupted her one-year-old Georgie’s exploration of food bits on the floor with a “Gross....

In the early 1970s, Alan Haberman (then in his early forties) chaired an ad hoc committee that chose the UPC bar code for the grocery industry. For the next decade Alan unrelentingly worked to persuade manufacturers, retailers and the public to accept...

I’ve been thinking about baseball, movies, ambiguous bar codes, and the FDA. On June 26, 1974, New York Yankee All-Star Derek Jeter was born, two-time Academy Award winner Elizabeth Taylor divorced (for the fifth time), and Sharon Buchanan, a young...

I’ve been thinking about pops, mobility, POPs, and opportunity. My pops is 90, and his mobility is waning—though he’s yet to entertain the idea of using a walker. He loves outings to Costco but navigating a shopping cart through the aisles is...

I’ve been thinking about sailboats, tug boats, and the technology needed for safely navigating medication-use waters. Twenty years ago this month, American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy published an article by Gerald E. Meyer, entitled “The use...

I’ve been thinking about pacifism, catechism, patient-recollection, and specimen-collection. Unfortunately, it’s easy to become insensitive to statistics about lives taken by bullets and bombs. Similarly, it’s easy to grow numb to oft-rehearsed...

I’ve been thinking about windmills, butterflies, and the global warming I am witnessing toward bar-code scanning at the point of care. This morning I’m in the Netherlands on a train to Utrecht. Behind in Brussels, GS1 is concluding its Global...

What’s a Saturday morning without Car Talk? After 30 years, I still enjoy eavesdropping on Tom and Ray Magliozzi taking calls from listeners about their automobiles’ ailments. Between outbursts of laughter, the bantering brothers diagnose, prescribe,...

I’d been thinking New Year’s resolutions were for the birds. Why is December 31 a more compelling reason for decision making than, say, April 14 or July 11? But this January 1 begged for some rethinking. So, the high-definition television is glaring...