RFID IN HOSPITAL MANAGEMENT

By: Shivani Joshi AMRAPALI INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT & COMPUTER APPLICATION HALDWANI, NAINITAL(UTTRANCHAL)

RFID IN HOSPITAL MANAGEMENT

How does it work?

Introduction Hospitals are the place where even a small mistake can cost a human life. Human beings are most prone to errors. We need to minimize the human intervention so that the chances of error are minimized. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology is just starting to make inroads into healthcare. Now a days, RFID (Radio Frequency Identification Devices) is the best technology available which provide a better solution to health care industry by reducing medication errors and improving patient care. Applications for radio frequency identification technology in the healthcare field seem to grow rapidly. RFID is also beginning to see use to provide more extensive patient identification than traditional bar coding can, and to track and locate capital equipment within the hospital. In years to come, RFID could be used for a variety of applications, including tracking and matching blood for transfusions, tracking pharmaceuticals, and combating the counterfeiting of medical products. RFID system capabilities are powerful and accurate capture data. They can easily be integrated into the hospitals wireless infrastructure that many hospitals already have in place. People are aware of barcoding, but RFID is only at the edge of their awareness. In this paper I have tried to find out area in health care management which can be accelerated using RFID. What is RFID? Radio Frequency Identification is a wireless system, relying on storing and remotely retrieving data using devices called RFID tags or transponders. These tags automatically identify, track and manage objects, people or animals. RFID is kind of auto id systems like bar codes, smart cards, voice recognization etc. RFID uses radiofrequency tags attached to people or objects to provide identification, tracking, and security. In healthcare, basic RFID is already being used to track patients for anti-elopement and antiabduction programs. 2

A low-frequency, passive, magnetically-coupled RFID system is made up of two partsa reader and tag.

Fig. 1 The object to be tracked is affixed with a RFID tag or transponder. The reader is kept at some distance like entrance or door frame through which object tracked had to be pass, emits radio signals. When the object containing RFID tag comes in range of radio signal emitted by reader, the tag is activated and it starts sending the information stored in it in forms of radio signal. The reader captures those signals, decoded it and sends it to host computers. In both the reader and tag, the antenna can be sized and shaped in different ways. Because of the small size of the tag, RFID tag can be designed to fit almost any situation. Placement of the tag and reader is now no longer critical since there is no contact or line of sight is required, the RFID system allows great freedom of movement. .

Types of RFID tags

RFID cards are also known as "proximity" or "proxy" cards. They are segretated into two major classification: Passive and Active. Passive Pure Passive or reflective RFID tags have no internal power source. The lack of an onboard power supply means that the device can be quite small: commercially available products exist that can be embedded in a sticker, or under the skin in the case of low frequency RFID tags. They are small and inexpensive but do not have a good range. Systems using passive tags are rapidly entering the pharmaceutical market to aid the fight against the circulation of counterfeit drugs.

Asset tracking And many more...

RFID In Healthcare Industry: The Advantages Compared to other identification technologies, our RFID systems offer many advantages: Tags can be hidden (embedded) in most materials No batteries needed ( in passive tags) Different shapes and sizes No line-of-sight required No wear Tags can be read even if covered with dirt or submerged Tags are almost indestructible Unalterable permanent serial code prevents tampering more cost-effective treatment higher quality medical care and Improved patient safety (as a result of reducing undesired medication effects). RFID tags emit signals that can be scanned simultaneously. RFID In Healthcare Requirements Industry: The

Active Active tags, which contain an internal battery and a radio transceiver. They can both read and write data on the chips they contain, can be read over longer distances and enable the development of potentially more sophisticated applications. Active tags are typically much more reliable (e.g. fewer errors) than passive tags.

Where is it used?

RFID systems can be used almost anywhere. Some current uses of RFID are: Inventory control Access control Animal identification (from cows to birds) Waste management Laboratory analysis Time and place dataloging Meat Processing Vehicle identification Ticketing Fishery Management Automatic Guided Vehicle positioning 3

Goal of medication administration is: "Right patient, right drug, right dose, right route, and right time. A Hospital management requires: Tracking pharmaceuticals from the manufacturer, distributor and pharmacy to the point of administering medication to the patient, Tracking movable equipment, furniture, medical devices and other high-value items both to provide ready access when needed and to reduce losses, Identifying the location of caregivers in hospitals and other institutions to ensure the most efficient assignment in response to emergencies,

 Ensuring the proper identification of laboratory specimens, including biopsy samples and containers of blood or urine to reduce medical errors, Tracking patients both for the purposes of redundant identification prior to the administration of medications or surgery and for protecting infants, Alzheimers patients, and others with special vulnerabilities, Managing controlled substances, pathogens and other materials that pose a public health risk.

Technology developers have also been working on systems to track patients, such as those with conditions that impair mental functioning, who could become confused or lost. An active RFID tag will broadcast its location and announce here I am. By using passive RFID tags, medication can be tracked in real-time from the hospitals pharmacy to intensive care and individual patients. Patients can be tagged with unique codes, reducing or eliminating medical errors such as the administration of the wrong medication or surgical procedure. Medication will be matched digitally to the individual patient by checking the reference codes on an RFID bracelet worn by the patient. Using handheld scanners, the nursing staff can read these codes, link them to the patient data on file in the hospitals IT system and gain instant access to detailed information on the patient, displayed on a screen. By gaining the ability to track and match medication throughout the organization in realtime, the hospital aims to reduce the risk of any dispensing errors. This auto-id system is also designed to record all medication in the patients file automatically, including details about type, quantity and time of medication. This uses a passive tag under the skin, which interacts with a database containing patient-specific information. The unique needs of hospitals for identifying and tracking blood samples, inventory, as well as supplies and lab specimens, demand the highest levels of accuracy and reliability. The National Institute of Medicine estimates that 100,000 patients die each year due to medical errors, including mislabeled pharmaceuticals or blood types. Healthcare companies are charged with guarding highly sensitive, valuable information and must meet regulatory compliance, making these environments quick to adopt RFID applications. The increased accuracy afforded by RFID solutions can help reduce errors and security breaches that occur in any phase of records management. International studies reveal that approximately every 20th patient suffers an adverse drug effect, and about 55 percent of these cases could be 4

RFID In Healthcare Industry: For Patient Care and Tracking

The patient safety can beensured using active RFID tags. By implanting a RFID chip with a patient's medical record, hospitals and emergency workers can immediately gain access to an ill or injured person's medical history regardless of location. Implanted chips are impossible to lose, which could reduce the chances of information theft. Also active RFID tags can be slipped onto the patients wrist by embedding it inside a waterproof waistband. The RFID tag inside a waist band can be programmed according to the location of the patient. It ensure to maximize comfort, safety and convenience across a patients length of stay in the hospital. The tagging of both patients and staff in hospitals is now the subject of increasing debate, in part because it could facilitate not only the identification of individuals but the tracking of their movements. In an emergency, an appropriate clinician could be more easily located and summoned on the basis of their proximity.

avoided, said Dr. Michael Hartmann, director of the pharmacy at Jena University Hospital and member of the Council of Europe Committee of Experts on pharmaceutical issues. We have selected SAP technology to expand our existing SAP Net Weaver environment and to enable the innovative use of RFID. This technology will enhance the security of our drug supply chain and reduce potential adverse drug effects. RFID is very important for linking the supply chain the patient. For example, if a patient has an adverse reaction to a drug, it can be traced back to the offending batch, which can be examined to see if a counterfeit drug was the cause. Assumptions can be made that lead to a patient being given someone else's medication or to sample pots being mislabeled. RFID technology could play a part in putting this right. An area where patients might start to feel the benefits of RFID is in the tagging of items on crash trolleys, where a diverse range of equipment and drugs must be in place and ready to use to deliver timely care to patients suffering cardiac arrest. Compared with traditional barcode systems, RFID would improve efficiency by shortening scan times and ultimately improve the quality of a patient's treatment. With barcoding, we still need to read each item, so RFID is better in this instance. Even RFID is a better solution in infant protection. Systems to prevent baby infant abduction are pretty standard. Every maternity ward has a kind of RFID system that locks the elevator if a tag goes near it. RFID contact-less ID systems for door locks are among the many forms of the technology that are common. Even when the mix up is uncovered moments after the mistake is made, this can cause heightened levels of anger and dissatisfaction with the services rendered.

Any mother-baby mix up is a potential liability to the hospital. This scenario can be guaranteed not to happen when staff follows a procedure of reading the babys tag and then reading the mothers tag and re-confirming the match that was initiated at the birth. New functions, such as the ability to locate staff and patients, as well as devices, are very exciting.

RFID In Healthcare Inventory/Asset Control

Industry:

For

In addition to increase patient safety and care, RFID can be used for assets tracking in hospitals. . An advanced automatic identification technology such as the Auto-ID system based on the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has two values for inventory systems. First, the visibility provided by this technology allows an accurate knowledge on the inventory level by eliminating the discrepancy between inventory record and physical inventory. Second, the RFID technology can prevent or reduce the sources of errors. Benefits of using RFID include the reduction of labour costs, the simplification of business processes and the reduction of inventory inaccuracies Hospitals can use the most advanced means of tracking assets available today, such as radio frequency identification. RFID automatically captures data on each individual asset or container and can indicate container contents without ever having to open the container. This technology is also combined with software applications that collect, maintain, track and analyze the data and 5

provide customized reporting of the location, status, and audit and maintenance history of each asset. Improve visibility of assets in the supply chain will incerese using RFID. This in turn reduce loss or damage of goods while in transitand also reduces labor cost and human error with automatic asset tracking technology.

new infrastructure will enable digital identification and immediate tracing of drugs down to the level of individual unit doses and also alert pharmacy staff as to the expiration dates of medication.

RFID In Healthcare Industry: RFID for Access Control

The RFID infrastructure can help to optimize logistics processes and enable demand-driven supply management. By fixing the active RFID tags on the costly mobile assets within the hospital, we can make them readily available for use at point of care. In this way, as the device passes through a read point, it is registered in the applications software in real time to be in that area. In this way, staff will know what area of the facility each piece of equipment is located when they really need to have it. The results are less time wasted for healthcare professionals scrambling to find equipment, better utilization of existing assets that reduces capital expenditures and most importantly, a patient gets the best care available reducing the likelihood of liability because of poor health care services. There are plenty of target assets in hospitals like: wheelchairs, specialized beds, surgical equipment, mobile devices, infusion pumps, radiology equipment, pharmaceuticals, and more. Moreover, using RFID system we can also trace whether each item is in use, available or in need of servicing. The RFID system can also track when a device is reaching its expiration date and instruct the database that another item needs to be ordered. The 6

There are some restricted areas in the hospitals where only authorize people can gain the access like ICU, OTs and places where confidential documents are kept. This can be ensured by placing the RFID tags on the ID cards of the employees and the reader placed at the strategic locations can be programmed to give access to the authorized persons. Only those employees are permitted to go inside only when they have IDcards with RFID embedded on it.

RFID In Healthcare Industry: Automatic Billing

RFID For

The hospital can have an interface to share information about the services and devices used with its billing system and have automatic billing

statements produced for the patient. Manual procedure of the billing is as follows: Some of the devices like Cardiac devices, which can have a value as high as $1,000, were located on a shelf accessible to general staff members without identification. Employees recorded manually on paper what items were used for which patients, and a copy of that information was then forwarded to the billing department. With this older system, items were more likely to get misplaced, their removal untraceable to any specific staff members. The proposed RFID solution for the above problem is as follows: Any employees must have proximity ID cards (in which RFID tags are embedded) to open the locked cabinet, for which the patient ID tag can be used and while billing this record can be used. This also cuts down on time-consuming paperwork.

patient identification, critical data relevant to the procedure and the site of the operation. These three elements are electronically documented to provide a secure audit trail for any procedure. Further, RFID systems eliminate a lot of compliance required in bar code systems. In general, we have found hospitals are not looking for the technology just for technologys sake. Hospitals want to run their facilities efficiently and profitably while delivering a higher quality care. In the light of the above statements we can say that RFID can increase the overall functionality of the hospital industry and chances of error are reduced.

Conclusion: RFID is becoming more of a reality in healthcare. Over the coming years adoption will accelerate. The cost of implementation always remains a major barrier to wider adoption of any technology. RFID tags have long been regarded as expensive, particularly those with active chips, and this has been a strong disincentive to early adoption, particularly as tags represent only part of the cost. Initially the adoption of RFID was slow due to the cost factor. Now with the increase use of RFID the cost have come down considerably. In some instances, adoption will be slow to displace barcoding, but in some applications, such as infection control, there will be rapid adoption of RFID. Like all other disruptive technologies, it will take time for full RFID adoption. In identifying objects that have been touched by an infected patient, for example, it could help tackle the spread of MRSA in hospitals. There is certainly a bright future for this technology. Moreover the RFID can easily be integrated with the existing infrastructure (Hardware and Software) of the hospital. With increase use of RFID in heath care, hospitals hopes to discover correlations between disease patterns and potential drug incompatibilities, enabling medical staff to better determine alternative treatments. Now the hospitals are using RFID to initiate a three-step verification process, covering 7

References: 1) White paper: RFID in healthcare by James Reiner and Mike Sullivan: www.ups-scs.com 2) Tillman, Donna-Bea (2004-1012).Evaluation of Automatic Class III Designation, VeriChip Health Information Microtransponder System.United States Department of Health and Human Services 3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile _asset_management 4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_ Frequency_Identification 5) "Turning in to RFID," Healthcare IT News, Goth, Greg 6) Baard, Mark (2006). RFID: Sign of the (End) Times?. Wired.com.