Singapore's National Healthcare Group (NHG) will use RFID to better track pharmaceuticals in hospitals and ensure proper administration of drugs to patients.
The NHG announced it has awarded the contract to solutions provider TCM-RFID in deploying the Intelligent Medicine Dispensing System (or i-MDS), which will be operational by the second quarter of this year.
The system runs on customized software developed by TCM RFID, and will be deployed initially on more than 300 Motorola MC50 and MC70 enterprise digital assistants (EDA) at two NHG hospitals.
The i-MDS was designed to prevent inadvertent errors in the dispensation of drugs to patients, according to Michael Oh, TCM RFID managing director.
Oh said: "The system is set up to ensure that all the right procedures are being followed when it comes to the administering of drugs to patients: The right drug, right dosage to the right patient at the right time and by the right method - whether orally, intravenously or by injections."
By putting healthcare information systems in mobile devices that connect via wireless LAN, the NHG is looking to increase productivity while reducing medical errors in hospitals.
TCM RFID's medicine dispensing system uses Motorola's MC50 and MC70 EDAs linked to backend electronic medical records via WiFi.
Hospital staff can use the EDAs to scan both RFID-enabled and bar-coded wristbands that are unique to each patient. They can double-check prescription dosages, pull up patient records, or enter new information such as changes in prescriptions or patients' allergies which are transmitted in real-time to a central database accessible only to qualified healthcare staff.
For security reasons, the information is not stored in the EDA itself, but either sent or received via browser access and web portals.
"Real-time information is ensured through a multiple tracking system that will alert our personnel on 24/7 duty if there is even a fraction of a second delay in transmission," said Oh.