Business Opportunity - Can RFID Technology Enhance Patient Safety?

One voice in the consulting world of healthcare made the remark that three times the number of patients die as the result of avoidable mistakes than in vehicle accidents. If this perception is anywhere near to being true, a closer and more expansive look at technologies such as RFID should seriously be considered.


This business niche is an excellent opportunity for a systems consulting company with database expertise and requirements gathering experience to offer the service of providing an accurate and well documented pilot study for their clients.


Performing pilots to assess the effectiveness and feasibility of RFID in hospitals could be perceived as an important option to reduce the number of avoidable mistakes and thus increase the safety of patients. So far, only rudimentary applications have actually been examined, given that testing integrated applications is difficult.


Potential areas of success are: tracking and tracing of patients; patient prescription compliance and reducing medication errors; reducing medical errors by linking electronic patient health-histories to tags; retrieving surgical equipment; and blood-quality tracking.


Although the complexities of introducing RFID in the hospital setting itself are already large, involving additional training requirements increases complexity. This often opens up the idea that RFID is not always perceived as the best solution. This perception is almost always the result of poor systems analysis and inadequate systems knowledge because of poor planning and no verifiable feasibility study with recommendations that ring true to the situation at hand.


For example, a number of consultant companies that deal with the supply chain for pharmaceuticals, often deem the 2-dimensional data matrix to be considered a more cost effective solution with less deployment barriers with a similar level of enhanced safety. This assumption varies from company to company but there is no doubt that when this topic is covered using a genuine systems analysis approach the tide turns in favor of a well-designed RFID system tag approach with the data matrix option acting as an excellent backup and replacement in small areas of the supply chain.


These findings are of course not enough to end all study on the subject. The use of RFID technology in conjunction with well-designed databases driving website software interfaces to enhance patient safety should continue to be further explored.


In the mean time the initial effort to install a database driven website to improve the accuracy of many healthcare operations would provide significant improvements even if a feasibility study weighed against a bonafide RFID information collection system.


This again points to the suggestion that a business opportunity exists for you or your company to provide this kind of service and introduce cost savings for your clients and profits for your efforts.