USER-INTERFACE REENGINEERING - INNOVATIVE APPLICATIONS OF BAR CODING IN A CLINICAL MICROBIOLOGY LABORATORY

Some clinical laboratory departments (such as microbiology) provide ex tensive reporting of text and other data not generated by instruments that can be interfaced to a laboratory information system. These data are usually entered into the laboratory information system manually by keyboard data entry, which can be cumbersome and time consuming. Bar codes, which are already used in laboratories to facilitate rapid entr y of sample-identifying information, have the potential to be used muc h more broadly as a generalizable data entry technique. We developed a comprehensive system that takes advantage of several applications of bar coding to facilitate the work of our Clinical Microbiology Laborat ory Central to our system is the use of bar code ''scripts'' to meet m any of our complex data entry requirements. Use of these scripts is tr ansparent to the laboratory information system (ie, no special ''drive rs'' are needed) because data are received as if they had been generat ed by typing the characters on the keyboard. The scripts consist of ba r codes that encode the series of keystrokes needed to give the approp riate response at the series of prompts offered by the laboratory info rmation system. Both alphanumeric and other keys, including carriage r eturns and special characters, can be converted into bar codes and inc orporated into scripts. By creating and printing these scripts in the laboratory using standard wordprocessing software and bar code fonts f or personal computers, laboratorians without specialized computer trai ning have the tools to substantially improve the data entry efficiency of existing data entry terminals for a variety of laboratory informat ion systems.