>>>I'm developing a app that we're planning on fielding nationwide. Right now, the system relies alot on data entry and that's where the majority of oour problems occur (type o's etc) So in order to eliminate that (oh, by the way, I'm generating nothing more than unique patient ids and printing labels which will now include a bar code!) we decided to print out bar codes on the lables and place them on the patient data sheet.
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>>I don't know the health industry requirements or standards for barcoding, or even if such standards exist. If you plan to do this on a national basis, I'd think you'd want to establish a standard for your product's labels as far as size and data content to make it easy for your clients to get the right equipment to read the labels...
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>Here's one place where they use it here: mark the bottles and samples of the donated blood. They do have pre-printed labels, in sets of five, so one goes to the bottle (a plastic bag now, yucch - but never mind, they still have good sandwiches there), three go to the samples, one goes to the papers, and they use scanners in each phase of processing. No errors - except when one of the readers lost its setup... and setup was printed in the manual, and the manual was missing. We found one in 24h (no, someone else was the supplier but refused to help), so it worked happily ever after.

Thanks, Dragan - I run into new, different (and usually annoying) requirements for barcoding all the time; I have enough trouble keeping track of what's needed for the publishing and shipping industries. :)

I think that the original question regarded not pre-printed labels, but generating labels for use in patient identification for a health-related application; I know I've seen lots of barcoded paperwork in hospitals, on insurance documents, and as you mentioned, on lab work!