Top 5 Common Yet Useful RFID Applications in Hospitals
When it comes to hospitals or healthcare facilities, RFID (Radio Frequency identification technology) has broad application prospects. The overall management system powered with RFID can realize the interaction between medical staff, devices, patients, and medical institutions.
Additionally, it helps in getting information as well as intelligence. This post talks about some useful RFID applications in hospitals and how it influences overall management.
- Identification Management for Newborns!
RFID wristbands have become an important application in obstetrical parental and newborn identification management, child identity verification, and infant anti-theft management.
In the gynecology division of the hospitals, the newborns will be given an RFID wristband to mark the baby’s unique identity and match the baby’s information with mothers. In case someone holds the mistaken baby, one just only needs to equate the wristband information of the baby and the mother.
- Management of Patients
Patients in hospitals and healthcare facilities are equipped with a bracelet with RFID tags. It mainly stores basic information like age and name of the patient, test results, past medical records, medication injection, etc.
Every RFID wristband has a unique code corresponding to the patients. In case of any emergency, the bands help doctors rescue the patient by offering a quick set of information. The best thing is that these tags are very easy to use, harmless to the skin, comfortable, and easily embedded in different chips.
- RFID Hospital Asset Tracking
Equipment used in healthcare facilities are costly, and the storage of the medical supplies should be done adhering to the standard storage standards. This intensifies the struggle and intricacy of hospital asset management.
With the help of RFID hospital asset tracking systems, one can get results by doing just half effort. This, in return, saves time, effort to track equipment and improves the hospital’s ability to manage assets.
- Security Access Control
Security access control using RFID is another effective application in healthcare facilities. Safety and security measures are very important as they can confine admission to important rooms that eliminate the threat of trespassing in the hospital. The system asks staff to tap the RFID card in front of the machine installed on the door to get access inside.
The best thing is that the entire mechanism restricts entry of any unauthorized people from going into the classified areas that may possess a threat for the patients and other life-saving assets.
- Track Surgical Tools
The conventional management of the surgical instruments is still based on manual work, labor-intensive, time-consuming, and easy to make mistakes. Even the use of laser coding is prone to corrosion and rust that mainly happens because of blood contamination and continuous disinfection during the operation.
RFID has got a wealth of successful experience in different applications. Advantages that it offers in the management of surgical instruments are:
- Works well even it has blood after the surgery
- Allows for batch reading for quick management
- Better inventory management for surgical tools
- Heat resistant disinfection
- Helps in effective counting of inventories and time management
There are many other advantages of RFID when used in collaboration with surgical applications.
RFID system offers a perfect solution for overall management in the hospital and makes the overall process efficient and reasonable. Please share your own experience with RFID in the hospital in the comment section.
