A Research on the Implementation of an ICT-Based Entry and Exit Control System to Prevent Hospital Infection

Abstract

Recently as contagious diseases such as SARS and MERS etc. have been widely spread across the globe, there is an increased emphasis on the importance of infection management. As hospital infection has been pointed out as a critical issue factor, the need to implement a disease control system in order to control infected patients is becoming necessary. Because hospital systems are information dense systems, utilizing ICT (Information and Communication Technology) and convergence technologies such as RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), Smart Devices, and LBS (Location Based Service) etc. are being proposed as the main methods to implement this system. But because previous research combining hospital data and the area of IT convergence, mainly conducted research with the objective of OA (Office automation) and MIS (Management Information System), there is a limitation of this previous research to be applied to infectious diseases and disease management. To address this, through in-depth interview with professionals, the entry routes of diseases into hospitals were examined and a method to prevent this was proposed in this research. The results of this research confirmed that to prevent diseases from entering a hospital, the most important factor was to increase the access layers of entrance of a hospital to control points of contact. Based on these results, an ICT technology that could be implemented in layers was proposed. It is expected that the results of this research will be helpful to managers and staff of hospital organizations that need to implement control systems to prevent contagious disease infection in hospitals.