Pharma Barcodes Acting Up? Here’s Why They Don’t Always Scan.

If you have ever worked with pharmaceutical products, you have probably aimed a scanner at a barcode and seen nothing happen. You try again. You bring the phone a bit nearer, then a bit farther away, adjust the angle, perhaps switch on the flashlight, and then the barcode scans as if nothing had ever gone wrong.

The first reaction is usually to blame the barcode: it looks too small, the printing may be unclear, or the packaging may be flawed. The truth is a little more nuanced. Barcode scanning can be difficult in pharmaceutical settings for a variety of reasons, and the barcode is only one of them.

Small Codes Carrying a Lot of Data

Pharmaceutical packaging is a good illustration of how difficult real-world barcode scanning can be. A lot of information must fit into a very small space. In addition to the product name, dosage, manufacturer details, warnings, batch details and expiration date, there is a barcode with crucial information somewhere on that comparatively small package.

This is one of the reasons why GS1 DataMatrix has become so important in pharmaceutical applications. A DataMatrix can store a significant amount of information while taking up relatively little physical space, which is extremely useful on small medicine packages. The smaller the barcode becomes, however, the more demanding the scanning process can be.

A barcode that looks perfectly readable to a person can still be hard for a camera and decoding engine. When a DataMatrix's individual modules are small, the camera must capture enough detail to tell them apart accurately. If the image is slightly blurry, the lighting is bad or the barcode is too far away, the scanner's job becomes much more difficult.

Packaging That Works Against the Camera

Pharmaceutical packaging doesn't simplify matters either. Some products are packaged in bottles, while others arrive in small cardboard boxes. Some surfaces are curved or uneven, others are glossy and reflective. When you point a phone at a shiny package with a flawlessly printed barcode, the light can reflect straight into the camera: the barcode is there and the camera sees it, yet it still cannot decode it correctly.

In these situations people often believe that a better camera will solve the issue on its own. It can help at times, but camera megapixels aren't the whole picture. What matters most is the device's ability to capture the barcode, the speed at which the image is processed, and how the decoding engine performs when the barcode isn't presented in ideal conditions.

Build for the Barcode People Actually Scan

Built for the barcode in front of the camera

When you develop a pharmaceutical application, you are not building it for the ideal barcode. You are building it for the barcode someone will actually hold in front of a phone or tablet in a distribution center, pharmacy or warehouse at eight in the morning. That barcode may be slightly damaged or tiny, or printed on material that reflects light. The person holding the device may move their hand, and the lighting could be poor. A good barcode-scanning SDK must be ready for those scenarios.

This is one of the areas where barKoder is designed to help. Instead of treating barcode scanning as simply a matter of recognizing a pattern, the SDK is built to handle practical scanning situations where speed and reliability matter.

Speed becomes particularly important in pharma. When a pharmacist scans a single package, a short delay might not seem like much. A warehouse worker, however, scans hundreds or thousands of products over the course of a shift, and those small delays quickly add up.

Reading the Data Inside the Barcode

The same holds true when an application needs more than the barcode value. Pharmaceutical barcodes can encode a variety of information, including the GTIN, serial number, batch or lot number, and expiration date. The application may need to extract and work with those separate pieces of data rather than simply returning a single, long string.

Between pointing the camera and seeing the result, five things happen:

When everything works, the user doesn't think about any of this: they point the camera at the package and move on.

Enable Only the Barcode Types You Need

Another small detail can make a surprisingly big difference when you develop a barcode-scanning application: don't enable every barcode symbology just because the SDK supports it.

If your pharmaceutical application is designed around a specific set of barcode types, configure the scanner around those requirements. If you know that your workflow primarily uses GS1 DataMatrix, for example, there is little reason to make the scanning engine search through every possible barcode format at the same time. The more specific you can be about what your application is looking for, the more focused the scanning experience can become.

This is especially useful when several different codes are printed on the same package. A medicine box can contain multiple symbols, numbers and pieces of text, and the application needs to know which information actually matters.

Medicines and their shipments mostly carry a handful of barcode types:

A pharmacy app that checks packs could switch on GS1 DataMatrix, EAN-13, UPC-A and QR Code and leave every other type off. In barKoder this is a few lines when you set up the scanner, and the scanner reads only the types you switch on. On Android:

bkdView.config.decoderConfig.SetEnabledDecoders(
    arrayOf(
        Barkoder.DecoderType.Datamatrix,
        Barkoder.DecoderType.Ean13,
        Barkoder.DecoderType.UpcA,
        Barkoder.DecoderType.QR
    )
)

On iOS:

guard let decoderConfig = barkoderView.config?.decoderConfig
else { return }
decoderConfig.datamatrix.enabled = true
decoderConfig.ean13.enabled = true
decoderConfig.upcA.enabled = true
decoderConfig.qr.enabled = true

In the browser, with the Web SDK:

Barkoder.setEnabledDecoders(
    Barkoder.constants.Decoders.Datamatrix,
    Barkoder.constants.Decoders.Ean13,
    Barkoder.constants.Decoders.UpcA,
    Barkoder.constants.Decoders.QR
);

In Flutter and React Native each type is switched on with setBarcodeTypeEnabled, for example setBarcodeTypeEnabled(BarcodeType.datamatrix, true). An app for the Italian market adds Code 32 (Code32, or code32 on iOS), and one that also receives shipments adds Code 128. The full list of types for each platform is in the barKoder documentation.

Why a Pharma Barcode Might Not Scan

Pharmaceutical barcode scanning is more complicated than it first appears. From the outside it looks simple: there is a barcode on a box, you point a camera at it, and you get the result. Underneath that simple interaction is a combination of image capture, barcode detection, decoding, data parsing and application logic, and every part of that chain can affect the final experience.

So the next time a pharmaceutical barcode doesn't scan, the barcode itself may not be the problem. The cause can be on the pack or in the scan:

What Good Barcode Scanning Should Feel Like

For developers creating pharmaceutical applications, the goal is not just to make a barcode scan in ideal lab conditions. The goal is to make it work when a real person holds a real product in a real setting.

The best scanning experience is one in which no one is even aware of the underlying technology.