The Development of RFID in Healthcare in Taiwan

Healthcare industry has unique characteristic about human’s life. Any mistake or medical error will cause the irretrievable regret. Patient safety is the most important issue in recent years. Because the uncertainly of disease occur, the demand of healthcare need, location and types are changed frequently. By the presure of “Self Management Plan”, how to make limited healthcare more effectiveness and effecency is critical for survival. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) can be able to provide to identify, tracking and tracing for patient or medical objects directly and continuously. RFID is made object wisdom and process automation. It debase the cost of collect data from first-line in tradition MIS. RFID in Taiwan is more famous. There are four kinds of applications in healthcare industry. Some of them will be the killer application when government’s policy trigger and industry full-scale implement in the future. There are six hospitals deploy RFID in pilot plans by government support. And there are still some necks of bottle in deployment. The research assisted by foreign research and extracts by the experience in expert interview. We point out the critical deployment factors by five dimensions, including: system technology (system readable rate, frequency limitation, instrument interference & Human healthy, and transmission distance), system cost, common standard, health industry infrastructure and system integrate, and the issues in privacy and security by patient. The future research tries to find out the total solution to deploy RFID in healthcare industry to build up the” patient safety healthcare environment”

The Application of RFID in Emergency Medicine

Recently natural disasters and man-made calamities happened very frequently in Taiwan, some of which caused hundreds of inhabitants died and injured. The most important thing that makes the emergency medical treatment system work effectively during these catastrophes is dependent on the accuracy and immediacy of the information among ambulances, hospitals, fire bureaus, public health bureaus or offices, and emergency executive centers. With this information, the medical system can arrange the resources efficiently. Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a kind of wireless technology that it uses radio frequency (RF) to identify target objects. The characteristics of RFID are its identification and orientation. Through tracing electronic signals, RFID is able to identify, orientate and trace patients or medical materials directly and continuously. Thus, RFID can help managers of medical institutions to promote emergency medical treatment quality, reduce medical mistakes effectively, and increase efficiency and effectiveness in hospitals. A series of emergency medical delivery applications that use 915MHz RFID rings is developed in this paper. Through the help of RFID, the paper integrates the information of the whole emergency medical supply chain, and establishes a new model of emergency medical activities to solve the problems of information blocking among different medical rescue units. By solving these problems, the new model can enhance the rescue quality, reduce the damage of the disaster and strengthen the patient-oriented emergency care system