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.
Later, Peris-Lopez et al. REF 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.
A comprehensive RFID solution to enhance inpatient medication safety
International journal of medical informatics
International journal of medical informatics
Computer Science Medicine