A heterogeneous RFID system to improve inpatient medication safety

P. L. Pedro et al. proposed Inpatient safety RFID (IS-RFID) to enhance inpatient medication safety by safeguarding every phase of medication administration; However, the proposed solution contains some security weaknesses. In this study, the weaknesses of IS-RFID are described, and a solution is proposed. The solution is the heterogeneous inpatient safety RFID system (HIS-RFID), which includes both passive (13.56 MHz) and active (2.4 GHz) RFID signals to enhance inpatient medication safety. HIS-RFID is capable of monitoring every stage in the medication administration process and can be used to identify inpatients, medical personnel and drug containers on-line to ensure that inpatients take the correct medicine from the correct drug containers at the correct time. In addition, a heterogeneous grouping proof algorithm (HGP) is designed into HIS-RFID to generate evidence to verify the inpatient tag, drug tag and medical personnel identification simultaneously. In practice, HIS-RFID can easily be incorporated into the hospital information system to enable error tracking during the medication administration process.