Critical Patient Identification Using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)

The increased focus on patient safety in hospitals has yielded a flood of new technologies
and tools seeking to improve the quality of patient care at the point-of-care. Hospitals are
complex institutions by nature and are constantly challenged to improve the quality of
healthcare delivered to patients while trying to reduce the rate of medical errors and
improve patient safety. Some simple mistakes that usually happened are such as patient
misidentification, specimen misidentification, wrong medication or anything that can
cause the loss of a patient's life.
In order to avoid these problems, RFID has coming with its solution. RFID stands for
Radio Frequency Identification. It is an automatic identification technology whereby
digital data encoded in an RFID tag is captured by a reader using radio waves. In other
words, RFID is similar to bar code technology but uses radio waves to capture data from
tags, rather than optically scanning the bar codes on a label. The most important
characteristic is that RFID does not require the tag or label to be seen to read its stored
data.
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) uses radio waves to identify different objects.
There are a wide range of uses for RFID technology, from identifying retail products to
tagging surgical instruments to locating patients. RFID technology has grown in its uses
and importance in many industries. As more and more businesses started utilizing RFID
technology, the RFID solution itself became much more reliable, easy to use, and less
expensive. Many hospitals and healthcare facilities have expanded the use of RFID
technology to include tracking patients, maintaining inventory, locating equipment, and
monitoring medications.