RFID in Healthcare Systems:

Abstract

Everyone has heard about tragic wrong-site, wrong-patient and wrong-procedure surgeries. Using an RFID tag attached to a patient, a physician can now verify the correct patient, procedure and site − prior to the start of any invasive procedure.. The health care community is now seeing tremendous benefits of RFID technology that can contribute to the healthcare industry with Wi-Fi and voice over IP (VoIP), creating a single information system that can track patients and hospital assets, improve patient safety, play a role in running clinical trials of drugs, manage critical care of assets and hospital equipment. It can reduce counterfeiting of pharmaceutical products, medical errors, and cut costs improving efficiency. In this paper, authors discuss about the application, benefits and challenges of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) in healthcare.