A New Visual Cryptography-Based QR Code System for Medication Administration

Abstract

In health care, medication errors can result in serious health risks to patients, and hospitals require a secure medication administration system to prevent such errors. This paper therefore proposes a secure medication administration method based on threshold sharing technology. When a patient visits a doctor and the doctor prescribes n medications, a photo and the personal information of the patient are encoded into n QR code transparencies that can be decoded by common QR code scanners available for smartphones. The prescription and n QR code transparencies are then stored in a hospital’s medication administration system. When the patient receives their medicine, they can scan these n QR code transparencies using a smartphone to ensure that they have all the medicines prescribed by the doctor; this function is accessible even if the patient’s phone does not have Internet access. The main purpose of the proposed system is to prevent hospitals from giving medicine to the wrong patient, or giving less than the prescribed dosage of medicine to the patient. The focus is not on the internal medicine packaging process in hospitals but on reducing the probability of counter staff giving medicine to the wrong patient. This function is of considerable importance to non-English-speaking people who are not used to reading medicine names in English.