FDA issues early alert for Baxter's Spectrum infusion pump

No they don’t. I helped lead a failed effort to implement UDI capture at a major academic research hospital. To date only Duke and Mercy health systems have implemented UDI capture in a limited capacity.

The big problem is that implementation requires significant up front capital investment and operational changes; for nebulous / speculative ROI in terms of dollars. So organizational incentives are just not there.

Ultimately this is the type of problem that will require government intervention to solve. And that intervention will require the creation of incentives for organizations to implement UDI capture - similar to how it took an act of congress (Obamacare) to incentivize healthcare systems to adopt electronic health care records and protocols for communicating / sharing health care information.

It is. FDA requires manufactures to display UDIs in packaging (or devices themselves) in human and machine readable format. But hospital IT systems are not set up to capture this information and they have no compelling (i.e. financial) incentive to invest in the IT system upgrades and operational changes needed to capture this information. You would think better inventory management would be enough of a selling point, but apparently not. I am convinced that it will take government interventions - like CMS requiring UDIs on reimbursement forms - to get it done.

US health care is 1 needle of sanity in a haystack of crazy.

I wish I had been on the committee when this change the browser API was proposed. I would obviously gotten kicked out for asking "just what the hell do you think people are going to do with this?". But at least I'd be somewhat infamous for asking the question when seemingly no one else was willing to.