Application of RFID Technology in eHealth

Abstract

Today’s hospitals are particularly interested in increasing the quality and efficiency of patient identification and monitoring procedures. While most patient health records are stored in separate systems, there is still a huge stack of paperwork left for health-care providers to fill out in order to comply with different regulations. Since many health care errors occur when important patient information is missing or simply not available, the electronic medical records (EMRs) may easily alleviate the distress of most doctors and nurses working in today’s care system. The next step beyond the EMR is to connect and provide medical information to primary care physicians, medical and surgery specialists, anesthesiologists, nurses, assisted-living staff, patients themselves, patient’s family and so on. However, each hospital may use a different system, store data in many ways and even decide upon its own data format. Furthermore, file system access and data retrieval are often governed by inconsistent parameters. Thus, the availability of medical information is seriously affected and effective communication among physicians is not achieved. Within this framework, the present chapter focuses on how RFID technology can be used in order to solve the problems eHealth is dealing with. After defining the EHR and EMR terms, we shall focus on presenting an RFID-based system (named SIMOPAC) that integrates RFID and multi-agent technologies in the field of health care. The purpose of this system is to make patient emergency care as efficient and risk-free as possible, by providing doctors with as much information about a patient as quickly as possible. SIMOPAC could be used in every hospital with the existing systems in order to promote patient safety and optimize hospital workflow. The SIMOPAC system will assure information exchange with electronic health record (EHR/EMR) (Smaltz & Berner, 2007; Hallvard & Karlsen, 2006) systems set up in healthcare units. This information exchange will be in accordance with the HL7 standards specifications. In the present chapter, we will focus on the RFID technology and how it could be used in emergency care in order to identify patients and to achieve real time information concerning the patients’ biometric data, which might be used at different levels of the health care system (laboratory, family physician, etc.). Within the SIMOPAC system, the access to medical information is granted by an electronic memory-based chip (RFID tag or transponder). This tag, named Personal Health Information Card (CIP, in Romanian) (Turcu & Turcu, 2008), allows patient information storage (Jonathan, 2004). We describe a general purpose architecture and data model that is designed for storing and presenting clinically significant information to the emergency care physician. Also, we present the strengths and weaknesses of this RFID-based systems used in eHealth.