The latest issue of Premier's Safety Share email newsletter links to a bunch of online resources for barcoding, RFID and patient safety. These resources are in the form of stories in the current issue of Patient Safety and Quality Healthcare.

• First up is a paper on barcodes and meds administration
  prepared by University HealthSystem Consortium. The story provides
  great background on the application, research on actual safety
  benefits, and a bit on the technology.
• The next piece is on “automatic identification,”
  and explores both barcoding and RFID as technologies for identification
  - patients, drugs, caregivers, etc. This article is a very basic
  introduction to applications and technology.
• In Intelligent Location, Radianse co-founder Mike Dempsey digs more deeply into RFID technology and applications, include some brief case studies.
• Finally, there's a story on tracking and identification in the clinical lab titled, Labeling and Tracking, Preventing Errors in the Lab that describes a number of applications for tracking specimens and lab orders.
• And finally-finally (I missed this the first time round) is a resource
  directory of barcoding and RFID vendors. The directory includes a
  rather eclectic group of vendors, ranging from “smart” IV pump vendors
  to component companies like Texas Instruments - very interesting.

A nice little treasure trove of patient safety applications for identification technologies.