Medical Consumables Tracking

About the Challenge

The Challenge is to track medication and medical consumables usage from a common medical kit containing pills, pre-metered injections, and other consumable items such as bandages and splints. Items must be tracked to a specific user. Compliance must be greater than 95% so the user interface of the system must add no more than 10% to the amount of time required to access the material without a tracking system. Our experience is overly complicated user interfaces are either misused or eventually ignored due to time constraints. Compliance in the past with written systems has been low, so a standard barcode scanner is thought unlikely to deliver the required compliance. We need something that is really minimal hands on by the user. Ultimately, the system will marry hardware/software with a database allowing physicians to know what medical consumables have been used, who used them, and when the medications in the kit expire so that the kit can be replenished in a timely fashion. The size of the kit can vary, but you can assume it has a volume of 0.008 m3 or less. The inventory tracking system should be flexible for the number of users, but 6 would be the maximum number of users on one time.