Drug distribution management system based on IoT

Abstract

In hospitals and pharmacies, the distribution of medicines is an important part. Any mistakes, misses, fake medicines and expired medicines can cause medical accidents. With the widespread application of the Internet of Things technology (IoT), traditional drug distribution methods need to be upgraded. This article proposes a drug distribution management scheme based on the Internet of Things technology. In the production of drugs, a flexible RFID tag was printed on the packaging box, which stored a series of information such as drug name, dosage, raw materials, efficacy, production date, expiration date, and manufacturer. The use of a drug distribution management system combined with RFID readers can identify drug information and effectively prevent the occurrence of erroneous, missed, counterfeit, and expired drugs. It can also improve management efficiency, reduce management costs, and control management risks. Through the circuit design and software system development, the test results show that this solution is effective and feasible, the proposed method can achieve the expected results.

A computer architecture based on disruptive information technologies for drug management in hospitals

“…The third novelty of this proposal regarding the state of the art is the comparative study of the different solutions for labelling and reading data on drug packages (IoT, RFID UHF, RFID NFC and barcodes/QR), considering economic as well as operational and environmental aspects. The results improve the state of the art since existing studies do not compare the four possibilities together ( Liu et al, 2022 ; Ruan et al, 2018 ; Camacho-Cogollo, Bone & Iadanza, 2020 ; Lee et al, 2019 ; Haddara & Staaby, 2018 ; Ebrahimzadeh et al, 2021 ; Vagaš et al, 2019 ; Ko & Woo, 2018 ; Zhang, Fu & Li, 2019 ; Buthelez et al, 2022 ; Cocian, Morales & Schneider, 2023 ; Petro et al, 2009 ; Iadanza, 2012 ; Wu, Kuo & Liu, 2005 ; Bevilacqua et al, 2013 ). In contrast, this study has analysed the four technologies and has shown the advantages and disadvantages of Barcode/QR, RFID and IoT for drug management in hospitals.…”

“…Therefore, individual reading is common. Finally, neither barcodes nor QR is capable of carrying out tracing and real-time tracking of the source of products ( Liu et al, 2022 ).…”

“…For example, if each container of a medicine carried an RFID tag, when the medicines sent by the supplier arrived at the hospital pharmacy service, it would suffice to pass the entire package close to an antenna to read all the tags at once and it would thus be possible to verify that the order is correct. A conceptual model to do this has been proposed by Liu et al (2022) .…”

“…Reuse is a difficult process due to the inconvenience in handling the label, so recycling seems the only way, but the cost of the labels is not recovered. To address this, ink-printed disposable RFID tags have been proposed ( Liu et al, 2022 ), but they are not known to be commercially available. On the other hand, barcodes/QR codes printed on article are easily recyclable with the standard recycling of article.…”

“…However, there are no examples in the literature that show how these technologies can be used and combined to overcome the existing problems and achieve efficient drug management in hospitals. Existing studies have focused on analysing the usefulness of only one or two of these technologies; for just some aspects of drug management, without considering the whole process from the moment the drug enters the hospital until it is dispensed and eliminated; and only for data capture ( Chen, Chen & Yang, 2020 ; Liu et al, 2022 ), data storage ( Pandey & Litoriya, 2021 ) or data exploitation ( Garcia et al, 2021 ), without taking these three issues into account at the same time.…”