A Multi-Constraint Scheme with Authorized Mechanism for the Patient Safety

Many research works have attempted to introduce passive RFID technology into medical systems to reduce medical errors. However, most of these proposed works focused on identifying patients and objects. If an RFID based medical system is only good for identifying patients and medical objects but not capable of halting any medical process immediately, then it is not possible to prevent medical errors from happening. Our research focuses on a mechanism to detect and to avoid medical harm before it occurs to patients. In this paper, we propose to incorporate multiple-constraints into the authorization scheme and used this scheme as a basis for implementing a medical management system avoiding medical errors to assist medical staff. Specifically, our scheme ensures that a medical operation is if and only if enabled when the constraints are being satisfied that an “identified patient” is being treated by a “certified medical staff member” within an “authorized area”. In practical environments, our authorization scheme can be applied to various healthcare applications, and we develop a prototype system and test it in three applications: X-ray control, specimen collection, and blood transfusion management. The experimental results show that the system can be used to enable X-ray when the X-ray is in authorized location and operated by authorized operator. For the specimen collection and blood transfusion, the logs showing which medical staff has done specimen or blood transfusion on which patient at authorized location are correctly recorded into Hospital Information System (HIS). The locating process can be performed within 10 to 20 seconds, and the locating error is less than 2 meters.