A prescription for health
RFID is transforming healthcare by reducing error, improving compliance and allowing patients, staff and equipment to be tracked accurately.
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Tackling medical error is a huge issue in healthcare, particularly in the administration of drugs where mistakes can endanger patients and drain already stretched financial resources.
Indeed, research by the UK’s National Patient Safety Agency found that over half of all problems with medications were caused by either giving the wrong dose, giving the wrong medication or by neglecting to administer the drug at all. Other studies suggest that medical error causes as many as 10% of patients to spend longer in hospital than necessary. Finally, of those patients that have an adverse drug event, over a third will experience a higher risk of death.
In an effort to improve the situation, the healthcare industry is turning to RFID, a technology that was initially expected to make its biggest impact in retail.
Safety benefits
“RFID is being used in hospitals across Europe with tremendous effect,” says Dr Lester Russell, Chief Medical Officer of Fujitsu Services. “It’s helping tie together complex processes to ensure the right people and resources are in the right place to administer the correct treatment to patients. If you imagine a large hospital with over a thousand patients: each will need an average of five or six drugs, three times a day. That adds up to tens of thousands of treatments given every day, each carrying the possibility of human error.
“Reducing these risks is a key application for RFID. For example, Fujitsu worked with a hospital in Madrid to create an RFID-governed drug management system that has cut drug errors by 90%. The impact on cost and patient welfare is nothing less than amazing. It’s literally a lifesaving piece of technology.”
At the heart of this and other deployments is the humble RFID tag, which can be read remotely from a distance of up to five metres and can store sufficient information to act as an intelligent label on patients, staff, clinical supplies or equipment. Backed by an appropriate database and applications, this makes it a powerful tool for asset management. With prices now measured in pennies per tag, the technology is finding increasing popularity.
“The typical application of RFID is in ‘positive identification and update’ to improve compliance in safety critical environments,” says Dr Russell. “So, for example, this might include tagging patients and blood bags to check that the right blood type is being administered, or tagging drugs and patients so that staff can use PDA scanners to match the drug to the patient and ensure the correct dose is given. The result is that hospitals can now confirm that correct procedures are followed at every step by identifying the patient, the drug, the correct administration route and dose, and ensuring that only a security-cleared individual is able to access and administer the treatment. This is a major step forward for medical compliance.”
Advanced applications
Beyond these relatively simple applications, RFID is also increasingly being used to hold complex data, like temperature readings from delicate transplant organs and performance information on artificial joints and other medical implants. Innovations like these should lead to more successful transplants, less invasive surgery and better supply chain monitoring. Routine tagging of equipment, meanwhile, is also producing efficiency gains through increased uptime and less duplication.
As with many technology solutions, RFID also has a range of softer benefits. Most notably, by simplifying drug administration, record keeping and other tasks, it What is RFI D? Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an automatic identification and location technology to retrieve data from transponder ‘smart-tags’ attached to people or objects. Tags hold and actively transmit information from a small memory which can be updated and read at a distance of 0.5–5m and outside the line of sight. Unlike ‘passive’ barcodes, tags are activated by radio waves and send their memory contents back to the reader. In this article: n Find out how RFID is being used in healthcare. n Read about its potential for dramatically reducing medical error. n Discover how hospitals are using it to improve equipment asset management. frees up healthcare professionals, particularly nurses, to devote time to more personal patient care.
As Dr Russell says, “Patient experience is a crucial and under-appreciated aspect of healthcare. The extent to which patients feel well treated and listened to can have a significant effect on health outcomes. In this way, RFID is far more than just a tool for compliance.”
To find out more about the potential of RFID, contact Paul Goss at:
E-mail:paul.goss@uk.fujitsu.com
