Cooperative RFID platform for asset tracking in smart hospital

Abstract

Currently hospitals are being challenged to improve patient safety and reduce operating costs. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) estimates that between 44,000 and 98,000 deaths per year are related to medical errors. They identified five phenomena that cause failures in operations in the health sector: medical errors, high costs, theft, forgery and inefficient flow. Medical errors are a leading cause of deaths, the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) estimates this number next to 500,000. The medical malpractice can result from the misidentification of the patient, adverse events related to drugs, exchange or loss of infants and accidents, such as surgical equipment oblivion within the patient. The FDA estimates that half of the errors can be prevented by the adoption of appropriate information technologies. Inefficient workflows is due to the difficulty of hospitals to allocate resources in real time. According to estimates, doctors and nurses spend about 30% of working time searching for information on patients. Based on the good results achieved by team members in the development of the project presented in the implementation of a prototype for tracking surgical equipment in a central material and sterilization, this project presents a system expansion proposal to identify the assets of all hospital, locate its position in space and time automatically and provide users with the required services. The assets include equipment, medicine, blood bags, as people, like: doctors, nurses and patients. The location of these assets will be done through a IoT (Internet of Things) system based on RFID (Radio Frequency Identification). During this first phase of the project the hospital's workflow will be analyzed to determine the requirements, such as: which assets to track, the tag type for each asset, the type of player, which monitor points, how to display the monitored data, etc. This analysis will form the basis for implementation in a second phase of a modular tracking and extensible platform. Part of the platform includes a RFID reader that will be developed, and the software and a database for controlling and visualizing processes. (AU)