Adapter-based Safety Injection System for Prevention of Wrong Route and Wrong Patient Medication Errors

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Patient Safety

Background:

• Medication errors, particularly wrong-route or wrong-patient administration, are significant challenges in healthcare.
• Human error is a primary cause of these preventable adverse events.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and evaluate a safety injection system designed to prevent medication errors.
• To ensure correct drug-to-route or drug-to-patient matching during injection procedures.

Main Methods:

• Designed two distinct adapters with unique key and keyhole patterns for specific drug-route or drug-patient pairings.
• Utilized rapid prototyping to create multiple adapter pairs efficiently.
• Ensured adapters provided a secure connection only between matching components (syringe tip and catheter injection-port).

Main Results:

• The system successfully created a mechanism to prevent injections when drug and administration route or patient do not match.
• Generated 27,000 unique, identifiable patterns based on adapter design variations.
• Demonstrated the feasibility of rapid, on-site production of specific adapter pairs.

Conclusions:

• The proposed safety injection system effectively addresses medication administration errors.
• The adaptable and rapidly manufacturable design offers a scalable solution for enhancing patient safety.
• This system has the potential to be implemented similarly to patient identification barcodes for improved clinical workflows.