Design and implementation of web-based mobile electronic medication administration record

Patients' safety is the most essential, critical issue, however, errors can hardly prevent, especially for human faults. In order to reduce the errors caused by human, we construct Electronic Health Records (EHR) in the Health Information System (HIS) to facilitate patients' safety and to improve the quality of medical care. During the medical care processing, all the tasks are based upon physicians' orders. In National Taiwan University Hospital (NTUH), the Electronic Health Record committee proposed a standard of order flows. There are objectives of the standard: first, to enhance medical procedures and enforce hospital policies; secondly, to improve the quality of medical care; third, to collect sufficient, adequate data for EHR in the near future. Among the proposed procedures, NTUH decides to establish a web-based mobile electronic medication administration record (ME-MAR) system. The system, build based on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) as well as embedded the HL7/XML standard, is installed in the Mobile Nursing Carts. It also implement accompany with the advanced techniques like Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) or Web services to enhance the system usability. According to researches, it indicates that medication errors are highly proportion to total medical faults. Therefore, we expect the ME-MAR system can reduce medication errors. In addition, we evaluate ME-MAR can assist nurses or healthcare practitioners to administer, manage medication properly. This successful experience of developing the NTUH ME-MAR system can be easily applied to other related system. Meanwhile, the SOA architecture of the system can also be seamless integrated to NTUH or other HIS system.