Two RFID-Based Solutions for Secure Inpatient Medication Administration

Abstract

Medication error can easily cause serious health damage to inpatients in hospital. Consequently, the whole society has to spend huge amount of extra resources for additional therapies and medication on those affected inpatients. In order to prevent medication errors, secure inpatient medication administration system is required in a hospital. Using RFID technology, such administration system provides automated medication verification for inpatient’s medicine doses and generates corresponding medication evidence, which may be audited later for medical dispute. Recently, Peris-Lopez et al. (Int. J. Med. Inform., 2011) proposed an IS-RFID system to enhance inpatient medication safety. Nevertheless, IS-RFID system does not detect the denial of proof attack efficiently and the generated medication evidence cannot defend against counterfeit evidence generated from the hospital. That is, the hospital possesses enough privilege from the design of IS-RFID system to modify generated medication evidence whenever it is necessary. Hence, we design two lightweight RFID-based solutions for secure inpatient medication administration, one for online verification environment and the other for offline validation situation, to achieve system security on evidence generation and provide early detection on denial of proof attack.