Automated identification system for medication care process — Part I: System specification

The aim of healthcare is that a patient always gets best treatment without any complications or errors. Information technology helps healthcare professionals to achieve this goal. However, professionals are often working under a heavy workload with scarce recourses. This may result in human errors that can affect the patient safety, for example a patient receives wrong medications during medication administration. In this paper we will describe an automated identification system for the medication care process in a hospital environment. The system will reduce medication errors and increase the patient safety by automating the identification process of patients and their medications. We will focus on the medication care process, on automated identification technologies, and how we will integrate these two for a new automated identification system in healthcare.