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

Abstract

Wrong-route or -patient medication errors due to human mistakes have been considered difficult to resolve in clinical settings. In this study, we suggest a safety injection system that can help to prevent an injection when a mismatch exists between the drug and route or patient. For this, we prepared two distinct adapters with key and keyhole patterns specifically assigned to a pair of drug and route or patient. When connected to a syringe tip and its counterpart, a catheter injection-port, respectively, the adapters allowed for a seamless connection only with their matching patterns. In this study, each of the adapters possessed a specific key and keyhole pattern at one end and the other end was shaped to be a universal fit for syringe tips or catheter injection-ports in clinical use. With the scheme proposed herein, we could generate 27,000 patterns, depending on the location and shape of the key tooth in the adapters. With a rapid prototyping technique, multiple distinct pairs of adapters could be prepared in a relatively short period of time and thus, we envision that a specific adapter pair can be produced on-site after patient hospitalization, much like patient identification barcodes.