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A New Method to Guard Inpatient Medication Safety by the Implementation of RFID

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Abstract

Since life is invaluable, the patient safety is always an important issue. How to reduce the malpractices and advance the patient safety is the primary goal of many countries. The current problem is that the hospitals cannot quickly and precisely identify the name of medicine, the position of patient and staff and the servicing time and dosage taken by patients. The application of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is rocketing in popularity as varieties of expanded uses. However, due to the investment consideration, there are few cases that practically implement such a technology in healthcare industries. This paper presents a Wisely Aware RFID Dosage (WARD) system, which based on an integration of barcodes and RFID tags, to demonstrate effective and safe patient care environment, for preventing the risk of medication error. Finally, through an evaluation of users’ satisfaction, a reliability of 0.92 and a criterion-related validity of 0.82 show that this system is able to effectively construct the patient-safety-centric environment.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management Information System, National Chung Cheng University, No. 168, University Rd., Min-Hsiung Chia-Yi, 621, Taiwan, Republic of China

    Pei Ran Sun & Fan Wu

  2. Information Technology Office, Chung Shan Medical University Hospital, No. 110, Sec. 1, Chien-Kuo N. Rd., Taichung, 402, Taiwan, Republic of China

    Bo Han Wang

Authors
  1. Pei Ran Sun
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  2. Bo Han Wang
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  3. Fan Wu
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Correspondence to Fan Wu.

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Sun, P.R., Wang, B.H. & Wu, F. A New Method to Guard Inpatient Medication Safety by the Implementation of RFID. J Med Syst 32, 327–332 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-008-9137-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-008-9137-9

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