Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Even though RFID has progressed in leaps
and bounds in all industries, especially in health-
care, the adoption of RFID technology has been
quiet slow due to its privacy and security concerns.
Another key barrier in widespread adoption
of RFID into healthcare is the high cost of this
technology. Even if healthcare facilities have in-
stalled the system, the payback periods by RFID
have been typically quite long. Even though the
cost of tags and readers have dropped significantly
over the past few years in order to allow more
businesses to adopt and benefit from it, most
companies find the RFID costs quite high for
their estimated budgets.
RFID Concern in Healthcare
Due to the privacy and security threats that prevail
in RFID technology, all healthcare centers and
organizations are skeptical about adopting RFID
into their daily work processes. As the tag ID and
content can be modified, healthcare organizations
are concerned that a patient's personal details,
medicines or blood group can be accessed and
if changed, it would have a great impact on the
patient's health. Although deactivation of tags
cannot be of much use for attackers because the
relations between the tags and patients are usually
performed in the hospital's database, they can still
succeed in creating a level of confusion among the
staff of the respective healthcare center. Physical
destruction and detaching of tags from hospital
assets or patients can also only create confusion
but cannot lead to affecting a patient's health.
However, if a detached tag from a medicine is
replaced on a different medicine, it can lead to
severe consequences for patients and healthcare
centers. Besides, since RFID tags can be read
from a distance, it is possible that someone can
read the tags in a manner that no one knows who
read the tag, from where and when, as a result of
which healthcare places and patients as well are
worried about the privacy of their information.
Hospital records, patient medical records and
history, drug information particularly are not
safe to be written on tags unless strict measures
like authentication of readers and personnel are
undertaken to prevent unauthorized access and
misuse of tag. Other security issues like jam-
ming, blocking, eavesdropping are possible but
seem unrealistic in this area of RFID applications
(Lieshout et al., 2007, p.140).
Solutions and Recommendations
Over the years, due to the increasing popularity
of Radio Frequency Identification and also the
number of concerns regarding the same technol-
ogy, appropriate measures have been put together
to counter these threats and issues related to RFID.
Many different strategies have been pursued to
cope with the privacy threats posed by the RFID
technology such as - formulating privacy laws,
using self-regulations and preparing technical
solutions for the problems faced.
•
Privacy laws:
Each country
follows a set
of privacy laws, slightly different from the
rest of the countries, but all serving the
same purpose of enabling protection of its
population's private information. The indi-
vidual governments need to do their part
by formulating stringent privacy laws and
revising them timely, keeping in mind the
rapid technological advancements, while
business sector and organizations need to
follow on the laws with care in order to pre-
vent privacy infringement, may it be to an
individual or an organization. Developers
can then develop RFID applications which
will comply with the requirements of the
devised privacy laws. In Europe, for in-
stance, the European Directive 95/46/
EC had taken a great initiative to tackle
privacy issues related to RFID. Many na-
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