You have been given the responsibility of developing the standards for using bar codes on medical record forms. Your facility plans to implement an EHR in 5 years and wants to take the intermediary step of purchasing an Electronic Document Management System (EDMS). They want to implement the imaging system in about 2 years. They believe EDMS is an important step, since they want to stop microfilming and the images can be linked to the EHR. Because it will take a while to implement the EDMS system, your facility has time to revise all medical record forms to add bar codes so that when the system is implemented, the time required to scan and index the records will be minimal and the quality of the indexing will be high.

1.What bar code format do you recommend? Why? (Hint - research the different types of bar codes.There are 13 major barcode types)

2.What other forms design and bar code issues should you take into consideration? (Hint - research best practice for bar code scanning)