title: A new method to guard inpatient medication safety by the implementation of RFID.
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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Management Information System, National Chung Cheng University, No. 168, University Rd., Min-Hsiung Chia-Yi, 621, Taiwan, Republic of China.
authors.forename: Pei Ran
authors.initials: PR
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.forename: Bo Han
authors.initials: BH
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Fan
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Wu
mesh_terms: D001291:Attitude of Health Personnel; D001330:Electronic Data Processing; D006801:Humans; D008508:Medication Errors / Q000517:prevention & control*; D010355:Patient Identification Systems; D017060:Patient Satisfaction; D010607:Pharmacy Service, Hospital; D010865:Pilot Projects; D019095:Point-of-Care Systems; D011846:Radio Waves