Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Technology And Patient Safety

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• Background:

Radio frequency identification (RFID) systems have been successfully applied in areas of manufacturing, supply chain, agriculture, logistics, asset management, transportation, healthcare, and other industry. However, challenges in using RFID technology and how to improving patient safety and increasing the impact of it in healthcare.

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• What Is Radio Frequency Identification ?

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a wireless technology capable of automatic and unambiguous identification without line of sight by extracting a unique identifier from microelectronic tags attached to objects.

The RFID is a technology that uses radio waves to transfer data from an electronic tag, called RFID tag attached to an object, through a reader for the purpose of identifying and tracking the object. The RFID is already used to track and trace the victims in a disaster situation. Data can be collected in real time and be immediately available to emergency personnel and saves time by the RFID. Crisis management teams, hospitals and emergency personnel, have access to data through a computer database.

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• How to build a safer Healthcare system, and avoid to make medical errors ?

In the past decade, the risk of harm caused by medical care has received increasing scrutiny. The growing sophistication of computers and software should allow information technology to play a vital part in reducing that risk — by streamlining care, catching and correcting errors, assisting with decisions, and providing feedback on performance.To our knowledge, there have been few previous reports based on on-site experiments showing that the RFID is suited for usage in a hospital, specifically for medication delivery and mapping nurse practice workflow. Organizational resources and technical structures such as hardware and software are very essential requirements in the redesign of electronic projects. 
Therefore, the RFID application in hospital management, it is valuable for quickly retrieving patient information and monitoring patient locations in the hospital.

Chao et al, in a study titled improving patient safety with RFID and mobile technology announced “These medical errors can be classified into five categories: 
Poor decision making, 
Poor communication, 
Inadequate patient monitoring, 
Patient misidentification, 
Inability to respond rapidly 
And poor patient tracking. 
Employing innovative information technologies in correcting these deficiencies and meeting the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organization (JCAHO) patient safety goals is the current trend in enhancing patient safety.

The result showed that the RFID adoption though assigned with low level of awareness; adoption capital recompense and infrastructural challenges in the Nigeria health sector in particular also has high and great tendencies to thrive. The result of the second research question revealed that the Nigerian health care service delivery can harness the benefits of the information technology (IT) solution system to function in its clientele servicing in forms like authentication and identification of personnel, patients’ data and blood verification; drug dispensary among others.

However, adoptting RFID technology in Healthcare industry shows that, also there are some barriers and critical success factors:

Barriers are:
(1) lack of information; 
(2) insufficient budget available; 
(3) complexity of technology and systems. 

Critical success factors are: 
(1) top management support and the commitment of leadership; 
(2) integrating the data collected; 
(3) coordinating among departments; 
(4) starting with small the RFID project.