[EASYSCAN: French pilot study for securing drug administration by barcode reading]. / EASYSCAN : étude pilote française pour la sécurisation de l'administration des médicaments par lecture code-barres.

OBJECTIVES: Medication errors are common at the time of administration. To prevent them, technologies allowing consistency check by bar code technology at bedside have been developed. Our study focuses on the evaluation of a BarCode Medication Administration (BCMA) called EASYSCAN with Electronic Medication Administration Record (e-MAR) to verify both patient's identity and medication to be administrated. METHODS: A prospective observational study was conducted during seven weeks in a French medicine ward. The performance of the system was evaluated by the success rate of BCMA and by the average time for administration with and without EASYSCAN. A satisfaction questionnaire about BCMA was proposed to nurses. RESULTS: We observed 182 administrations including 87 (48%) with EASYSCAN. The verification of the patient's identity was successful in 77% of administrations and 65% of the drugs were scanned successfully. The main causes of check failures were the lack of datamatrix on the drug (81%), error messages (14%) and the lack of system functionality (5%). The average time for administration per patient was significantly increased: 4.68min/patient with versus 2.87min/patient without EASYSCAN. CONCLUSIONS: The study shows the EASYSCAN's performance in its first version. Material and software evolutions and an increase of nurses'pratices will be necessary to continue the experimentation of this system still unpublished in France.

[Non-Hippocratic references in Plato's dialogues]. / La référence médicale non-hippocratique dans les dialogues de Platon.

Plato's references to contemporary medicine are of a twofold nature. They initially concern Hippocratic medicine, first as an epistemological model in opposition with sophistic arguments, secondly as an instrument to define 'political art'. But in the later dialogues, Plato's references to medicine appear to evolve into a 'non-Hippocratic', magical type. This second type of reference-mostly in the Laws-is no longer metaphorical or analogical: it serves to determine the procedures that must be followed by the Law-Giver to establish a theocratic order.