For those of you who are involved in the medical billing industry and don't know what barcoding has to do with your job, hopefully, this installment on barcoding will give you just enough information to be informed and not so much as to confuse the stuffing out of you. Barcoding is kind of a behind the scenes process that ties in to your retail sales operation, if you have one.
The medical industry has been shortchanged. No doubt about it. While we can walk into a supermarket and pick up just about any item and find a UPC, or Universal Product Code, the same can't be said about all medical items. Yes, there are many that do use the UPC code to stamp the item's description and price, but there are still many items, usually equipment items, that just don't have this luxury. Because of this, if a customer goes into your retail establishment and wants to get a walker, most likely the cashier will have to manually type the price into the system, which better be displayed somewhere on the walker to begin with or you're going to be standing around a long time waiting for a price check. Yes, it's a messy process that nobody likes; not the patient or the worker.
Barcoding to the rescue. Most DME software packages offer barcoding as an option. This is not to be confused with simply reading an existing barcode on an item, which you can do as well. This is the process of actually creating your own barcode labels for an item so that the item description and price can be stored in the system and thus scanned just like any other item when a patient comes in to make a purchase. So, how exactly does this work? Actually, it's very easy.
The first thing is that the barcoding software has to be installed into the stock DME system. Usually there is an extra charge for this. Then, after the installation, the barcoding hardware has to be set up. This consists of a special printer and some peripherals that are specially made to print out UPC labels, even though they are technically not the same. The format is similar but not exact. Of course you do have the option of printing out your labels in UPC format. This also usually costs extra.
What you do is type the item description and price into the software at the computer. After you do this, you simply choose the option that says "generate barcode" or something similar. Make sure there are labels in the printer when you do this. After you choose the option, the label will print and you'll have your UPC code ready to be scanned when a customer makes a purchase.
While this all may seem very simple, there is a lot of technology that goes into this process. Barcoding systems are usually thousands of dollars in addition to the cost of your standard DME system. And the labels themselves aren't cheap either. So if you decide to get into barcoding for your sales, you want to make sure you do enough volume to justify the cost.
