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tient planned to leave the hospital before
completing all the scheduled services, or
completed all procedures but forgot to re-
turn the tag and was leaving, the system
would detect that the tag went out of range
of Wi-Fi nodes and immediately alert the
security at the exit, who would stop the
person and redirect him/her to the appro-
priate location; Furthermore, if a patient
has a medical emergency during the ser-
vices, he/she can simply tug down on the
tag which will trigger an alert that is trans-
mitted to the hospital management along
with the name and location of the patient.
Implementation of this system was a huge
success in Chennai. Apollo plans to install
the system for similar purposes at its other
hospital branches in India as well. Many
other hospitals are also holding discussions
with Icegein to install the complete system
in their own buildings (Swedberg, 2010).
filter the assets by type. Judging from the
profit margins and success rate imposed
by RFID, the hospital is considering to ex-
pand the system to cover the other areas of
the hospital as well (Roberti, 2010).
•
Meridian Health, which is an organization
that operates five hospitals in New Jersey
and a home-care service, piloted a system
that it developed in partnership with sili-
con chip company Cypak, using an RFID
enabled pain management product knows
as Impak Health Journal for Pain. Figure
4 shows that the Health Journal of Pain
is basically an RFID enabled cardboard
foldout having several questions regard-
ing pain management, which the patients
need to answer by pressing buttons on the
card and later placing it on a reader to up-
load the responses into a database from
where the patient's physician can access
the data. The system has been developed
to address those who suffer from chronic
diseases and to curtail their uncomforting
by improving their medical management,
offering them greater independence and
ensuring their safety when they are not in
a healthcare setting. The journal contains
an embedded battery-powered RFID tag
that can store data (up to two reports daily
for 36 days) and transmit the information
to a reader and it also supports Near Field
Communication (NFC).
•
A 500 bed hospital in southeast Georgia
saves $400,000 by using RFID to track its
assets, instead of hiring a contractor to do
the same. The hospital workforce reported
that before the adoption of RFID technol-
ogy into their work process, it was difficult
to track the location, maintenance costs
and utilization rates of their assets. After
thorough research, the asset management
team of the hospital discovered that use of
RFID system for in-house asset manage-
ment would be cheaper than paying a con-
tractor, even after accounting for the hiring
costs of additional people to replace con-
tracted workers. The hospital installed the
complete system which covered 75 percent
of the hospital's areas and began using it in
May 2010. The system makes the search
process trivial for the in-house staff as it
allows them to type in an asset number to
locate and view it on a map of the hospital.
The staff can use the system to check what
equipment is in a certain unit and even
Every patient is given a journal and is asked
to answer the printed questions about the sever-
ity of their pain - on taking the prescribed pain-
suppression dose, on consuming a higher dosage
for breakthrough pain and on completing an hour
after taking the medication. This information
stored in the RFID tag of the journal, is read
through readers at the physician's office by plac-
ing the card onto the reader which captures the
journal tag's unique ID number, together with the
pain management and medication responses re-
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