Willard K E, Shanholtzer C J
Pathology and Laboratory Medicine Service, VA Medical Center, Minneapolis, MN, USA.
Arch Pathol Lab Med. 1995 Aug;119(8):706-12.
Some clinical laboratory departments (such as microbiology) provide extensive 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 entry of sample-identifying information, have the potential to be used much 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 Laboratory. Central to our system is the use of bar code "scripts" to meet many of our complex data entry requirements. Use of these scripts is transparent to the laboratory information system (ie, no special "drivers" are needed) because data are received as if they had been generated by typing the characters on the keyboard. The scripts consist of bar codes that encode the series of keystrokes needed to give the appropriate response at the series of prompts offered by the laboratory information system. Both alphanumeric and other keys, including carriage returns and special characters, can be converted into bar codes and incorporated into scripts. By creating and printing these scripts in the laboratory using standard wordprocessing software and bar code fonts for personal computers, laboratorians without specialized computer training have the tools to substantially improve the data entry efficiency of existing data entry terminals for a variety of laboratory information systems.
一些临床实验室科室（如微生物学科室）会提供大量文本及其他非仪器生成的数据报告，这些数据无法与实验室信息系统对接。这些数据通常通过键盘手动录入实验室信息系统，这可能既繁琐又耗时。条形码在实验室中已用于方便快速录入样本识别信息，它有潜力作为一种通用的数据录入技术得到更广泛的应用。我们开发了一个综合系统，利用条形码的多种应用来方便我们临床微生物实验室的工作。我们系统的核心是使用条形码“脚本”来满足我们许多复杂的数据录入要求。这些脚本的使用对实验室信息系统是透明的（即无需特殊“驱动程序”），因为接收到的数据就好像是通过在键盘上输入字符生成的一样。脚本由条形码组成，这些条形码对在实验室信息系统提供的一系列提示下给出适当响应所需的一系列击键进行编码。字母数字键和其他键，包括回车键和特殊字符，都可以转换为条形码并纳入脚本。通过在实验室使用标准文字处理软件和个人计算机的条形码字体来创建和打印这些脚本，未经专门计算机培训的实验室工作人员有了工具，可以大幅提高各种实验室信息系统现有数据录入终端的数据录入效率。
