Enhancing Patient Safety with the MedAlert SYstem (MASY): A Low- Cost Timer for Medication Administration Alerts

Abstract

When it comes to patient safety, the timely administration of medication tends to be a critical factor in almost all the healthcare related environments, especially in hospital wards of any scale and clinics where multiple patients simultaneously require any form of medication. In many small to medium scale hospital wards and rural healthcare environments, where commercially available systems which are developed for patient management tend to be extremely costly to deploy due to many factors such as the scale of the facility and lack of staff with the necessary knowledge to run and maintain such a sophisticated system, staff always seem to rely on logbooks for the purpose of tracking the issued doses and the times at which these specific medications are issued. This process is prone to human error, inefficiency, data tampering, and lack of accountability. This paper therefore presents an economical solution addressing the issues mentioned above: the MedAlert System (MASY), which is a low-cost, standalone timer unit specifically designed and developed for healthcare settings. This system, based on the popular Arduino open-source platform, enables medical staff members to manage multiple medication timers simultaneously with no reliance on any logbooks or other external references. This system also offers both visual and auditory alerts to ensure that medication is always administered at the correct time. Unlike commercial patient monitoring systems implemented in large-scale hospitals, MASY can operate independently, with no reliance on servers or internet connections. Due to its simplicity, this system can be easily modified and implemented according to local workflows. This paper discusses the system’s software, design, human machine interaction, and the future scope of the system’s development. It is believed that implementing such a simple device has the potential to reduce missed or delayed medication doses and, in turn, improve patient safety in almost any setting.