Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
patient's medical situation. Patient identi-
fication, tracking and also patient health in
Melbourne hospitals can be monitored eas-
ily with the help of RFID system. This sys-
tem improves patient tracking and stream-
lines patient care processes by bringing
together crucial events from patient admis-
sion to discharge. It also improves patient
safety by giving the hospital staff real time
data and task coordination tools required to
boost patient care (Chowdhury & Khosla,
2007, p.364).
manage the read data and monitors to dis-
play directions to patients. Patients are
given a lanyard with an Ekahau tag (Wi-
Fi enabled RFID tag) at the time of their
registration. The tag contains a unique ID
number, a schedule of appointments, and
listings of different departments that they
need to visit. The Ekahau tag also com-
prises three buttons - first button which is
pressed by a staff member at the registra-
tion desk to activate patient tracking, while
the second and third button is pressed by
any hospital staff to indicate that start and
end of a particular service for the patient,
like blood sampling. The patients are
tracked at all times via the Wi-Fi system
regardless of where they are in the hos-
pital. The system can also determine how
long the patient will take in a particular
department depending on the waiting line,
and if for some reason the process is de-
layed longer than the expected time span,
the Icegein software displays an alert on a
PC monitored by the hospital management
and instructs some staff to redirect the pa-
tients to other departments and also uses
the data to adjust future scheduling to im-
prove patient flow. The software informs
the patients about which diagnostic depart-
ment they need to visit next at the end of
every service, by displaying the name of
the patients and department on a digital
screen mounted in every department of the
hospital. The Icegein software is even pre-
pared to handle exceptions intelligently -
if a patient misses out on the information
displayed on the monitors or reads them
incorrectly and lands in the wrong depart-
ment, the system automatically adjusts that
discrepancy by permitting the patients to
undergo the service unless it had already
been done or if it is not required and then
directing the patients again to visit the
next department; Additionally, if any pa-
•
Mentor Me is a system designed to provide
a way to identify the position of a person in
a given space. For instance, a woman with
a heart disease and wearing an RFID tag
can be confined to a small area in a crowd-
ed hockey stadium and can be located eas-
ily, since the tag continuously provides the
coordinates of the person. If the woman
needs any kind of medical help, she can
press a button on the sensor that she car-
ries and instantly her location and position
information along with her health files/
reports are sent to the emergency staff.
This technique was used during the Torino
Olympic Games in the year 2006, to local-
ize people with health problems in a crowd
(Lieshout et al., 2007, p.182).
Other Successful Applications and
Case Studies of RFID in Healthcare
•
Apollo Hospital Chennai which is India's
largest healthcare facility employed an
Icegein Real Time Locating System with
RFID tags. With this system, the hospital
was able to track 250 patients simultane-
ously as the patients underwent dozens of
diagnostic procedures in less than half a
day, thereby improving patient flow and
saving time. The Icegein system consists
of active tags for patients, Wi-Fi nodes to
read those tags, software to interpret and
Search WWH ::
Custom Search