RFID in healthcare
RFID-based healthcare technologies enable hospitals to more efficiently track on-site assets, including equipment, instruments, and consumables, while also monitoring patients, laboratory work, and access to restricted areas.
RFID solutions
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Poor inventory management and distribution of equipment and consumables often significantly disrupts internal operations. From consumables to hospital beds to ultrasound machines, hospital assets can be equipped with RFID tags. The RFID tags are attached to or embedded in the equipment to be tracked. RFID tags can also be attached to packaging containing medications and disposable items such as gloves, plastic vials, or syringes.
RFID readers are installed in hospital rooms and hallways, transmitting information about the location of items. This allows nursing staff to track the position of movable assets. This is especially important for tracking mobile devices and items such as thermometers, blood pressure monitors, and stethoscopes.
Data on the inventory of consumables and medical equipment is also updated regularly, contributing to improved asset management quality. Monthly, weekly, and real-time reports provide information on how different departments are using hospital assets to identify missing or underused items. This allows for needs-based planning of which devices or consumables should be considered for the next purchase.
But be careful: RFID can negatively impact the performance of special medical devices such as defibrillators, pacemakers, dialysis machines, and monitoring devices. Passive RFID tags draw their energy from the electromagnetic field of RFID readers and therefore have less impact on nearby devices. Things are more complicated with active tags, which themselves emit radio waves. For effective implementation of RFID technologies, it is recommended to position readers and medical devices so that there is no interaction between them, or to use RFID systems with different reading ranges. Otherwise, device malfunctions can occur.
Conclusion
RFID solutions help optimize asset management in healthcare, increase patient safety, and reduce time and costs in the long term.
Medical devices and consumables such as disposable gloves, masks, towels, blankets, workwear, and instruments can be located by hospital staff, preventing or reducing loss and theft.