Patients face risks of health damage from medication error. To prevent such errors, hospitals need a secure medication administration system. Using threshold sharing technology, a secure medication administration method is proposed here. When a patient visits the doctor and the doctor prescribes n medications, a photo of the patient is encoded into n portions. Then the prescription and these n portions are stored in the hospital information system. Any portion provides the smallest quantity of information needed to reveal the smallest part of the original photo. As more portions are received, more of the photo is revealed. Once all n portions have been received, the original photo is revealed with very little distortion, meaning that the method is highly fault-tolerant. Before dispensing medications, the dispensers at the medication counter should scan the tags of all drug packages. If the dispensers at the medication counter have the correct n medications, the computer receives the n portions, and the photos of the patients are displayed on the screen. Then the dispensers at the medication counter know that there are no drugs missing or wrong, and also which drugs belong to which patient.

Medical Security, Medication Administration, Image Sharing