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Practicality, User-friendliness, Extensibility &
Scalability
DMS provides users with information about
drugs immediately. By using DMS, they can
easily determine whether the drug has reached
its expiry date and it will interact with other
drugs. A real time alert (or pop up window) is
used to warn the users of abnormalities and
thus bring their awareness to the problematic
medicines. Furthermore, with the user-friendly
interface of DMS, users can easily distinguish
between drugs that look alike by the checking
system to avoid medication error. Furthermore,
the DMS applies an international standard and
a global unique serial number (i.e. EPC) to
identify drugs at item level that can be adopted
by different clinics or hospitals. When more
and more clinics and hospitals adopt the DMS,
it can be extended to pharmaceutical
manufacturers so that the whole drug supply
chain can be traced and tracked easily (ITU,
2005).
Figure 10: Screen Capture of Expiry Date Alerting
Function.
Figure 11: Screen Capture of Drug-Drug Interaction
Checking Function.
Social Responsibility
Traditionally, inspections are carried out only
when patients are found to be sick after taking
wrong medicine. However, with the help of
RFID, DMS improves the efficiency and
effectiveness of drug management. All the
problematic cases can be brought to the
attention of the operator (such as the nurse) in
real time. By adopting DMS, clinics can
adequately address social and environmental
concerns in their business operations. The
proposed system will assure drug safety
consistently. Thus, patient safety is enhanced
by reducing medication errors. In addition,
DMS speeds up the drug replenishing and
dispensing processes that help to reduce
operation expenses. This can drive the
stakeholders to scale up change throughout
their clinics.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors would also like to express their sincere
thanks to the Research Committee of the Hong Kong
Polytechnic University for providing the financial
support for this research work.
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