Blogs
June 26, 2025 / July 2, 2025 by Gina Breckenridge
Medication errors remain a persistent and preventable challenge in healthcare, contributing to over 200,000 patient deaths annually and costing hospitals millions of dollars. These errors are often the result of a combination of factors, including staffing shortages, disjointed systems, high-pressure clinical environments, and limited supply chain visibility. Medication administration is the final and most critical link in a complex chain involving up to 30 separate processes—from physician orders to the bedside. At each stage, opportunities for error multiply.
To address this systemic problem, hospitals are increasingly investing in RFID-enabled medication management systems. These intelligent technologies offer an end-to-end solution, increasing accuracy, workflow efficiency, and patient safety.
Clinicians are taught to follow the Five Rights of Medication Administration—right patient, medication, dose, time, and route. These steps help to ensure patient safety by minimizing medication errors at every level of care. However, even when providers practice these principles, several common factors continue to undermine safety:
When someone is in a rush, they’re more likely to make a mistake or forget something; this is especially true in a patient care setting. Fast-paced environments often exist across departments, from the pharmacy to the operating room and every unit in between. And these high-pressure settings increase the risk of mistakes. For example:
Even a pharmacist with decades of experience will make mistakes, and that isn’t due to a lack of caring. Solely relying on human accuracy—especially across disconnected electronic systems—is not realistic. Tedious tasks like medication cart replenishment, cross-platform documentation, and properly recording medication waste due to expiration or over-ordering are time-consuming, increasing the risk for documentation errors and conflicting information amongst systems.
According to the 2024 National Pharmacist Workforce Study, 73% of pharmacists working full-time in 2024 rated their workload level at their place of practice as “high” or “excessively high”, compared to 66% in 2014.
Understaffing, especially within a hospital pharmacy, directly contributes to burnout by creating increased and unrealistic workloads, heightening the risk of oversight. Staffing shortages in the pharmacy can result in longer times to fill prescriptions, delays in kit and tray restocking, and gaps in inventory management, all of which can jeopardize hospital operations and patient safety.
According to American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) guidelines, hospitals must adopt robust systems to reduce the risk of medication errors and enhance patient safety. These guidelines, along with evolving regulations set forth by DSCSA, demand data integrity at every step of the medication journey; and obtaining that accurate, real-time data is made possible with RFID technology.
Choosing to invest in intelligent, interoperable medication management systems is critical for health systems sooner rather than later. That’s because RFID plays a pivotal role in the digital transformation of healthcare that is currently underway. With RFID-enabled medication management solutions, hospitals and patients are protected by creating an environment of safety around every medication from manufacturer to the point of care.
From manufacturer to the hospital pharmacy, the last step on the medication management journey is the point of care. The operating room is an excellent case study of how dynamic and complex medication administration can be in practice. In the OR, anesthesiologists may need access to eight or more controlled substances within a matter of minutes. In these high-stakes scenarios, even a small error—such as administering the wrong syringe due to improper labeling—can be fatal. Similar to the pharmacy, medication errors that may occur in the operating room can be prevented with the latest technology. For example, RFID-powered anesthesia stations—which are part of an intelligent medication ecosystem—can help mitigate risks in the OR via:
Investing in RFID and intelligent, interoperable solutions enables:
Patients deserve to feel safe across all care settings, whether they come to a hospital through the ER, for a routine procedure, or a life-saving surgery. Ultimately, adopting intelligent medication management systems positions healthcare organizations to deliver optimal patient care by preventing harmful medication errors.