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RFID Solutions for Healthcare Industry
The healthcare industry has never been more focused than now on ways to reduce expenses and save more patients lives. Technology is helping to increase these efficiencies. RFID technology specifically is being put to work in different areas of the system such as asset, patient and staff tracking, patient-bedside care, and ensuring operating room procedures are safer.
Asset Tracking using RFID
Healthcare facilities invest large capital in upgrading and maintaining expensive equipment required by healthcare professionals for diagnostics, treatment and monitoring of patients. It is crucial that the equipment must be easily available when required. When the equipment needed is not readily available this leads to many unwanted outcomes:
- Staffs are sent scrambling through the ward and over many floors to find the equipment they need.
- A medical institution acquires additional equipment to compensate for frequently misplaced equipment.
- Patient's health is at stake when a machine is not available when needed.
RFID technology eliminates the above shortfall. The technology can be as simple as attaching an RFID tag to each piece of equipment and strategically implementing readers throughout the area where the equipments are used. In this way, any valuable assets can be located when needed. Staff can easily locate where in the facility a certain piece of equipment is located when they really need to have it. The outcome is less time consuming, better utilization of existing assets and patient care improves.
Patient and Staff Tracking Solutions
Healthcare facilities are more concerned now days about having the ability to accurately track and locate their patients and staff. Whether it's providing medication for patients, identifying the patients for procedures, pulling up a history of treatment on a patient or locating their staff in case of emergency; RFID technology is the way forward to manage the information much more efficiently.
An RFID enabled system is used for accurately locating and tracking people, equipment and objects in a hospital. The system can be designed to track hospital assets, reduce excess expenditures, increase safety and ensure security and access control by placing RFID tags on assets, patients and staff.
Hospitals and Emergency Medical Services (EMS) are facing routine challenges especially when responding to emergencies. They need to be able to manage a large number of patients during an emergency effectively and efficiently.
The healthcare institution is responsible for the safety and care of its patients. If a patient is missing from their hospital bed or emergency ward the responsibility rests with the healthcare organization. RFID makes tracking and locating patients easy. Administering bedside care is safer and faster because of real-time and accurate identification and verification of patient.
- RFID bracelets can be worn by patients. An RFID bracelet can be read through bed linens, so patients don't have to be disturbed when sleeping.
- Patients can be geo-located by using RFID bracelets and readers in certain floors or corridors to ensure patients do not wander beyond a predetermined area.
- RFID bracelets can hold some key patient information or all the information can reside on a database logically linked to the RFID bracelet.