Pharmacy Drug Administration System

Medication administration errors, partially caused by inefficient drug administration processes, are often responsible for a great deal of morbidity and mortality in the hospital setting. These errors may be attributable to poor system design or implementation, stressful healthcare environments and non-compliance with standard healthcare procedures. This paper presents a Radio-frequency identification (RFID) based solution that builds on the Smart Drug Tray approach given by Houliston, Parry and Ticehurst [1] and provides an extension in terms of software design that ensures that nurses follow the standard procedures in order to guarantee that no mistakes occur during drug administration. Our experimentation, in which range testing and our developed software prototype testing were applied to RFID-tagged drug containers and patients, showed positive results. Future work will focus on performing extensive testing on our solution and integrating it to a Hospital Information System Hospital Z.