A comprehensive RFID solution to enhance inpatient medication safety

Abstract

Errors involving medication administration can be costly, both in financial and in human terms. Indeed, there is much potential for errors due to the complexity of the medication administration process. Nurses are often singled out as the only responsible of these errors because they are in charge of drug administration. Nevertheless, the interventions of every actor involved in the process and the system design itself contribute to errors [23]. Proper inpatient medication safety systems can help to reduce such errors in hospitals. In this paper, we review in depth two recent proposals [7,12] that pursue the aforementioned objective. Unfortunately, they fail in their attempt mainly due to their security faults but interesting ideas can be drawn from both. These security faults refer to impersonation and replay attacks that could produce the generation of a forged proof stating that certain medication was administered to an inpatient when it was not. We propose a leading-edge solution to enhance inpatient medication safety based on RFID technology that overcomes these weaknesses. Our solution, named Inpatient Safety RFID system (IS-RFID), takes into account the Information Technology (IT) infrastructure of a hospital and covers every phase of the drug administration process. From a practical perspective, our system can be easily integrated within hospital IT infrastructures, has a moderate cost, is very ease to use and deals with security aspects as a key point.

Nurses' Experiences toward Perception of Medication Administration Errors Reporting

“…One definition frequently employed by medical doctors of MAE is any deviation from the physician's medication order as written on the patient's chart (10) . However, the definition typically cited in literature that is authored by nurses defines MAE as ‗mistakes associated with drugs and intravenous solutions that are made during the prescription, transcription, dispensing, and administration phases of drug preparation and distribution (11,12) . These errors can be classified as either acts of commission or omission, and may include wrong drug; wrong route; wrong dose; wrong patient; wrong timing of drug administration; a contra-indicated drug for that patient; wrong site; wrong drug form; wrong infusion rate; expired medication date; or prescription error.…”

Secure e-Health System on Passive RFID: Outpatient Clinic and Emergency Care

“…This design is one of the future trends of RFID technology development in hospital environments [4,8,18]. The cost of RFID tag reflects the capability of tag; that is, heavy cryptography modules always need higher computation cost while lightweight ones require fewer.…”

“…That is, without any demosystem implementations, the practicability of these two protocols still has space for improvement. Later, Peris-Lopez et al [4] implemented an Inpatient Safety RFID System (IS-RFID) which takes into account the information technology infrastructure of real hospital environment and completely covers the whole drug administration process. The system efficiency can be guaranteed as only lightweight cryptography modules such as random number generator and exclusive-or operations are exploited in IS-RFID.…”

Interference Issuses of Radio Frequency Identification Devices in Magnetic Resonance Imaging Systems and Computed Tomography Scan

“…In the healthcare sector, accurate identification of the patient is a critical issue [6] and any shortfall in this category may result in irrevocable or irreparable loss to the patients, particularly in the case of surgeries [7][8][9]. Careful attention must be given to the accurate identification of the patients during their stay in hospital.…”