RFID, Radio Location Service Use Soaring at Hospitals
94 days ago
A new study shows hospitals are aggressively deploying a range of active and some passive radio-frequency identification systems.
The payback no longer is simply being able to find medical equipment including wheelchairs. Increasingly, wireless identification and location data is being used to streamline and repair a range of healthcare workflows and business processes.
The study, "Trends in RFID 2008," is based on 100 telephone interviews earlier this year with IT professionals and clinical and nursing directors at hospitals with typically 300 or more beds. It was carried out by Greg Malkary, founder and managing director of Spyglass Consulting Group, a market-intelligence and research firm in California.
A previous Spyglass study was done in 2005. Since then, the number of RFID-based applications has tripled, Malkary found. "A few years ago, they were trialing [RFID] technology, with a few hundred objects being tracked," he says. Now there are large-scale product deployments rolling out, tracking thousands of objects in multiple locations.
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