RFID Applications and Adoptions in Healthcare: A Review on Patient Safety

Patient safety is a serious global public health concern. Official statistics show that there is an increasing number of mistreatments within healthcare due to the improper identification of the patient or the drug administered to the patient. It is believed that the majority of the medical errors caused by misidentifications are preventable by introducing integrated IT infrastructures. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is believed to be the next generation technology for tracking and data-collection and has successfully been applied in several industries such as manufacturing, retail and logistics. RFID technology is also seen as the next disruptive innovation in healthcare and represents several opportunities for increased safety, operational efficiency and cost savings, by tagging inventory, assets, patients and personnel. Even though RFID promises several benefits for the healthcare industry, the adoption of RFID technology in the health sector has not been as striking as anticipated and still lags behind compared to other industries.

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RFID in healthcare: applications for improved patient safety

Patient identification
Patient tracking
Patient monitoring
Patient drug compliance

Challenges of RFID adoption in healthcare

Technological challenges
Security, privacy, and data management challenges
Organizational and financial challenges

Product Of RFID in healthcare:

Tags,
Readers,
Printers,
Software

key Companies In RFID in healthcare

3M,
Hitachi, Ltd.,
NewAge Industries, Inc.,
AAID Security Solutions, Inc.,
Motorola Mobility LLC,
IBM,
Siemens AG,
ACC Systems Incorporated,
BearingPoint,
AMERICAN RFID SOLUTIONS, LLC.

Conclusion and future research avenues

RFID adoption in healthcare opens up for a lot of opportunities to improve patient safety. This includes using RFID for patient identification, patient tracking, patient monitoring and improving drug compliance. Implementing RFID technologies for such purposes can reduce the chances of medical and human errors in hospitals and other healthcare institutions. The adoption rate of RFID in healthcare is extremely low contradicting first predictions in the early 2000s, and the future of RFID still remains uncertain. This is mainly due to several challenges and barriers, like high adoption costs, lack of industry standards, lack of privacy and security protocols, and poor awareness of its importance to the healthcare industry. To increase the adoption of RFID in healthcare there is a need for satisfactory security and privacy measures and regulations, more seamless integrations with existing information systems, institutional support and increased awareness among top management, and RFID systems that are more customized for hospitals. Future research should investigate the issues affecting RFID adoption in healthcare, particularly those related to the patients’ privacy and security, as these were found to be important factors affecting the adoption of RFID for patient safety related purposes. In addition, there is an apparent research gap on technological issues that may affect RFID adoptions and implementations in healthcare. Finally, there are also legislative and social challenges with adopting new technologies in general, and RFID and IoT in particular. Once legal and social challenges and issues are resolved by consolidated legislations and improved RFID technology security standards, healthcare organizations are expected to speed up their pace to adopt RFID for patient related applications

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References:

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