Above Board
Is Your Hospital Ready for Radio Frequency Identification?
By Jan Greene
As if hospital leaders didn't have enough trouble keeping up with the latest handheld this and wireless that, a new, sophisticated technology is emerging on the horizon: radio frequency identification, also known as RFID.
Gaining momentum from retailers and the military, the technology, which uses radio waves to automatically identify and track inventory, is creeping into hospitals as well, with a grab bag full of possible uses. The most practical idea, and the one gaining the quickest acceptance among health care systems, is to attach active RFID tags to expensive or vital supplies. The items can then be retrieved quickly when needed--think stray IV poles or tablet computers--or monitored so they don't stray away in the first place, as in the case of medications or high-priced medical implants. The technology could also thwart drug counterfeiting--by attaching a unique identifying tag to a drug at the manufacturer, it can be tracked to make sure it goes directly to the hospital pharmacy, arriving unaltered.
RFID tags are also being attached to people, such as newborns whose security in the hospital can be better ensured with an RFID wristband. Additionally, radio frequency IDs can track clinicians within the hospital so they can be reached quickly in an emergency; emergency departments can use it to follow patient charts and improve efficiency; the operating room can use RFID to reduce wrong-site surgery or other patient identification errors.
Intriguing as many of these applications may be, adoption has been slow in health care, with just a handful of organizations leaping into the RFID fray. Many that have committed to bar coding, for instance, are still looking to get their money's worth out of that technology before they invest in something new. The key for the average hospital is waiting for the technology to prove itself. And that analysis will differ with each application.
"The first thing hospitals should be looking at RFID for is asset management (tracking supplies and equipment)," advises Kent Soo Hoo, research project manager for the Health Technology Center in San Francisco and the author of a new report on RFID in health care. "That is a slam dunk, a no-brainer. Strategically speaking, every system will eventually want to do it."
The next step, Soo Hoo says, is tracking people, whether patients or staff. "The issues surrounding that will be much more hard to quantify and have larger implications in changing the ways people work. That is one reason we feel that patient or staff tracking is still a few years out for the average hospital," he explains.
It's a good idea to take a big-picture view of how RFID might be useful in your facility, particularly when an application requires the installation of radio or wireless infrastructure within ceilings and walls that could have multiple uses.
So the next task should be to set up a multidisciplinary, hospital-wide team and be sure you include the nurses, right? Well, actually, it might be better if the IT department takes on the main responsibility for understanding RFID's capabilities and working with specific departments to develop individual projects, recommends Tuck Crocker, managing director of McLean, Va.-based consultant BearingPoint's health care practice in California.
"The hospital should not be adopting an RFID implementation plan that is hospitalwide, because each application is going to apply to different parts of the technology and they may be totally incompatible with each other," Crocker says. For instance, RFID tags could be used by materials management to track a portable X-ray machine, and also by the pharmacy to track a unit dose of an expensive drug. "But the tagging technology is different, the actual use of the application is different, and the value of the application will be different," Crocker notes.
The analysis should be focused less on the hardware and more on the business purpose of the project, including whether a vendor can offer a realistic return on the investment. "There are some strong benefits out there," says Nick Evans, global lead on emerging technologies at BearingPoint. "But it's not about the technology, it's about the specific application." These uses are so new and untested, Evans argues, that there's no right or wrong way to do things--yet. "Experiment with what makes sense," he says.
Jan Greene is a writer based in Alameda, Calif.
RFID
| What is RFID? | Radio frequency identification is a generic term for technologies that use radio waves to automatically identify people or objects. The most common method is to store a serial number on a microchip attached to an antenna. |
| What's the difference between passive and active tags? | Active RFID tags have a transmitter and their own power source (typically a battery). The power source is used to run the microchip's circuitry and to broadcast a signal to a reader (the way a cell phone transmits signals to a base station). Passive tags have no battery. Instead, they draw power from the reader, which sends out electromagnetic waves that induce a current in the tag's antenna. |
| Is RFID better than using bar codes? | They are different technologies with different applications that sometimes overlap. The bar code is "line of sight," requiring the scanner to "see" the code to read it, which is not required by an RFID reader. |
| What has kept RFID from taking off before now, since the technology has been around for decades? | Cost and standards. RFID tags have recently gone down in price, increasing interest in their use. Still, readers typically cost $1,000 or more. Also, standards were only recently established for long-range RFID, known as UHF, the type most companies want to use in the supply chain. |
This article 1st appeared in the December 2099 issue of Trustee Magazine.
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