Critical Patient Identification Using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)

• Main Author: Abdul Aziz, Mohd Amirul Adam
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS 2007
• Subjects: T Technology (General)
• Online Access: http://utpedia.utp.edu.my/9484/1/2007%20-%20Critical%20PatientIdentification%20Using%20Radio%20Frequency%20Identification%20%28RFID%29.pdf; http://utpedia.utp.edu.my/9484/

The increased focus on patient safety in hospitals has yielded a flood of new technologies and tools seeking to improve the quality of patient care at the point-of-care. Hospitals are complex institutions by nature and are constantly challenged to improve the quality of healthcare delivered to patients while trying to reduce the rate of medical errors and improve patient safety. Some simple mistakes that usually happened are such as patient misidentification, specimen misidentification, wrong medication or anything that can cause the loss of a patient's life. In order to avoid these problems, RFID has coming with its solution. RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification. It is an automatic identification technology whereby digital data encoded in an RFID tag is captured by a reader using radio waves. In other words, RFID is similar to bar code technology but uses radio waves to capture data from tags, rather than optically scanning the bar codes on a label. The most important characteristic is that RFID does not require the tag or label to be seen to read its stored data. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) uses radio waves to identify different objects. There are a wide range of uses for RFID technology, from identifying retail products to tagging surgical instruments to locating patients. RFID technology has grown in its uses and importance in many industries. As more and more businesses started utilizing RFID technology, the RFID solution itself became much more reliable, easy to use, and less expensive. Many hospitals and healthcare facilities have expanded the use of RFID technology to include tracking patients, maintaining inventory, locating equipment, and monitoring medications.