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Patient Wristbanding: The Advantages Of Thermal Over Laser Solutions
Bar coded wristbands provide a convenient way to comply with The Joint Commission's National Patient Safety Goal to "improve the accuracy of patient identification" and provide a foundation for other patient safety applications, such as bedside medication administration or specimen collection. Bar coded patient identification wristbands help prevent medical errors by making accurate patient information available at the point of care and enabling caregivers to confirm a correct match between the patient and the treatment provided. As such, it is critical for wristbands to remain readable and scannable throughout the entire patient stay.
A basic understanding of thermal and laser print technologies is helpful in understanding the variances in bar code quality and image durability. Thermal printing doesn't require toner. Rather, the printhead creates images by burning small squares onto either coated label media (direct thermal) or onto a ribbon (thermal transfer). These squares are then stacked to create the bars that make up the image, resulting in clear, crisp bar codes that can be easily scanned.
Thermal printers are optimally suited to produce 2-D symbols and very small bar codes, and can produce small labels to precise tolerances—a challenge for laser printers. Laser printers produce images by projecting small dots onto the page, which does not allow for the superior edge definition that squares provide. Furthermore, laser output is susceptible to toner flaking and smudging. This can lead to low image quality and repeated scan attempts, which may jeopardize both patient safety and staff productivity.
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