Prescription preparation assistance kit using RFID

Abstract

The Chief Pharmacist’s Office of the Hospital Authority HA (Chief Pharmacist’s Office, 2008) cautioned that 15% of the incidents occurred in HA are medication incidents and there are 1882 drugs incidents in 2006 - 07. Reducing medications incidents, therefore, is a very important issue. There are five common causes account for the medication incidents in HA where nearly 30% of the causes are due to distraction, inadequate knowledge/skills and similar drug name/appearance. The top three prescribing errors are "wrong patient", "wrong drug" and "wrong dosage". The facts and statistics show that human careless errors are the main causes for medication incidents related to drugs. In view of the current situation in the in-patient and out-patient pharmacies of the public hospitals in Hong Kong, this project aims to provide a supporting system for improving the accuracy and efficiency in the prescription preparation procedure. The system requirements are defined based on the visit of Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital and face-to-face interview with the pharmacists. The system can assist multiple and automated verifications of the drugs prepared from a patient's prescription and medical record to minimize possible errors in the dispensing procedure and consequently alleviating the pressure of the pharmacists, drug dispensers and nurses in the drug preparation. In this project, RFID technology is utilized to render extra safety and streamline the procedure. The system developed in this project is a web-enabled RFID application using real drug database of the U.S. FDA and integrated with the expert knowledge provided by professional pharmacists.