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Improving patient safety with technology has thus become an urgent need.
Hospitals need an innovative approach to improve the process of operations.
The purpose of this paper is to apply radio frequency identification (RFID) to
solve emergency room operational problems. The Wan-Fang Hospital is the
only hospital implementing the emergency room RFID information system
in Taiwan. This paper reports on the findings of a case-based research inves-
tigation. It introduces emergency room workflow, which monitors the triage
patient's waiting time and the treatment process. The RFID system is applied
in the emergency room workflow as a new service era to improve patient
waiting time and accuracy for patient treatment and prevent human errors.
15.1 Introduction
There are 44,000 to 98,000 patients that die yearly, which leads to $17 to $29 bil-
lion in loss, and this is resulted from treatment errors in the United States [1].
Although the accuracy of numbers has been challenged, these medical
disasters show the treatment errors are serious. The Joint Commission on
Accreditation of Healthcare Organization (JCAHO) has proposed six major
goals for medical institutions to pursue patient safety. These goals include
accuracy of patient identification, effective communication between medical
care providers and patients, improving medication safety of high-risk
medication error, eliminating the occurrence of errors regarding patient's
operation position, and cost-effectiveness of a clinical warning system. The
Institute of Medicine (IOM) reports [2] its goal is to achieve a twenty-first
century health care system that is evidence-based, patient-centered, and
systems-oriented. Hence, using information technology to improve patient
safety has become a primary trend [3], hospitals need innovative approaches
to improve medical care and patient safety.
The emergency room is the place to fight for every second in order to save
a patient's life. However, there are some crises contingencies in an emergency
room, such as uncertainty of patient visits, shortage of medical staff, critically
ill or trauma patient's long wait time before receiving treatment, and lacking
managerial monitoring of the quality care mechanism. Basically, the hospital
emergency room needs to audit and maximize its operation without having to
dramatically increase employee numbers. It is required to apply information
technology to achieve this goal [4]. Lately, hospitals are applying RFID to solve
emergency room challenges [5] and drug safety [11], but there is the rare hospital
applying RFID to manage emergency room workflow. Thus, this study focuses
on a RFID-enabled information system, and the purposes of the system are pre-
venting human errors, tracking every patient case, and pursuing patient safety.
This paper is divided into five sections. In Section 15.2, the mobile
medical care information system literatures are viewed; meanwhile, the
 
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