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Ortho Vision Not Reading Barcodes


RRay

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Reaching out as a last resort here...

We have an Ortho Vision that reads patient barcodes at ~50% rate.  I have opened many tickets throughout the years of having this specific Vision and never get far with trying to resolve. Completely unacceptable.  50% is a lot to manually assign.  So now that we are evaluating analyzers for next year, Ortho is pressing to solve this issue but is still at a dead end with the information they can provide.  Every experiment I do leads me in a different direction.

Has anyone else had issues with barcodes reading on the Vision?

I'll list all the information I can remember at the moment but nothing makes sense here.  This is the biggest rock in the shoes of our techs and has been so for far too long.

  • Issue is ~98% with patient labels, not usually reagents or units
  • Brand new label printers did not increase the read %
  • New barcode reader installed within the Vision, and later recalibrated with no change
  • Handheld scanner and all other analyzers (even Vitros) have no issue with these labels
  • I can print the same label on 5 different printers (old and new) and either they all read or they all reject
  • Ortho is saying that labels we sent in for analysis are less than A-C grade in quality but they look perfect and the printers meet Zebra and Epic specs (even junky labels will read 50% of time)
  • Tried matte and shiny tape covering the barcode as well as different heights on the tube
  • A batch of labels that wouldn't read on our Vision were put on a demo Vision where they also wouldn't read (these labels were visibly perfect to the naked eye, no dead lines from the printer)
  • Reached out to Zebra and they verified that label printer settings and format received from Epic are standard and within spec
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@John C. Staley  I totally agree and am currently in that process.  We have other demo analyzers coming in a couple weeks and the first thing I'm going to do is throw on some barcodes that I know the Vision won't read.  I'm very nervous though that if they don't read on other BB analyzers then I HAVE to figure this out.

Vision is easy because a lot of techs have had exposure to it (at least in this general area), but that's the extent of the pros.  I'm pretty tired of shipping and stock issues and generally poor customer service compared to other companies I have experience with.  

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We had issues with our Visions not reading barcodes also.  We did learn that the Vision needs approximately 4 mm of a white margin on either side of the barcode to read.  We adjusted our barcode printer and that enabled the Visions to read the label.  Not sure if anyone at Ortho told you that.  I think it was our service rep that let us know that hint! Good luck!

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@BldBnker Yes, Ortho did tell us that and we have more than 4mm on each side, closer to 8-10mm.  Even some barcodes that don't have the white space, say because of date/initials in the way or blood smear, will often read when the perfectly printed and clean labels will not.  It's making me crazy.

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Our Visions won't read our outpatient cancer center labels which have a blue border.  If the label is crooked or the sample isn't positioned correctly, it won't read. Other than those, ours are pretty good at reading.  More than 50% sounds like too many. Sorry you haven't been able to fix it.  We run about 3000 specimens per month on our 2 Vision Maxes which were installed about 1 year ago.

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