I have a new job.
To explain it, let me tell you a story.
Have you ever been in the hospital, or with a family member in the hospital, when all the chaos is surrounding you — the busy nurses, the other patients talking, the machines going beep-beep-beep, the occasional sirens outside — and wondered, “How will we get the right medication? Are we sure those are our test results? How will they know who it is in this bed?”
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I have. And I have wondered all those things. And thought about the consequences if they go wrong. It’s a scary moment, easy to feel powerless. And the stakes feel high.
But then the nurse comes to take observations, and scans the wrist band. Beep! Medications are scanned before they’re put in that tiny paper cup. Beep! The phlebotomist takes blood, and attaches barcodes to the vial. (That will beep in the lab.)
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And I know everything is going to be okay. The people and things in the real world are connected to the electronic records by those barcodes. It gives me a massive sense of relief.
So that’s my new job. I’m the system architect for the standards around barcodes, which means that everything from how they get encoded (how a number becomes those zebra stripes or QR code etc) through to what info goes in them so it can go beep at the bedside or cash register.
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And it includes how the numbers in the code can be turned into a web address, linking the physical world with the virtual.
It’s not just healthcare, it’s shopping at the supermarket, it’s buying clothes online, it’s shipping stuff around the world. Supply chains. Logistics. And how this stuff gets written into laws and regulations. And it’s not just linear, “zebra-striped” barcodes — it’s also 2D barcodes like QR codes and GS1 DataMatrix, RFID tags and NFC. And globally unique identifiers.
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