Hospitals Extend RFID and RTLS to New Applications

As service organizations driven by process efficiency and patient safety, hospitals have been an "early adopter" of RTLS and RFID asset tracking.   Early applications included monitoring the location of medical equipment in patient rooms, as well as monitoring patients and medical staff. 

Now primary care providers are deploying RFID asset tracking in more diversified settings and applications, from inventory management of consumables and supplies to process compliance in central sterile and in-house testing labs. 

Common RFID-enabled processes in Hospitals include:

• Specimen Tracking
• Managing Medication Across Multiple Supply Locations
• Surgical Instrument Processing

Surgical instrument processing is well suited to RFID automation, which enables error proofing the intake, inspection, sterilization and kitting of surgical instruments and scopes, as illustrated below:

Automating a Medical Scope Tracking Process with RFID

RFID in O&G - Multiple Use Cases for Multi-Faceted Operations

When asked by an Oil and Gas firm "Why Should We Use RFID?" our conversation ultimately leads to process challenges within the business.  Oil and Gas firms are complex entities, that may span operations as diverse as Exploration and Production to Petroleum Refining to Retail.   

So sometimes an Oil and Gas firm can be like a Chemical company, a Consumer Goods Manufacturer, a Retailer, a Mining company.  

We summarized some of the facets of an O&G firm (and some of the most common use cases specific to RFID) in the table below.

We'll keep refining (no pun intended) the list of use cases as we go along.

RFID's Role in Healthcare Process Automation

RTLS and RFID have played an important role in improving Healthcare process efficiency, tracking medical equipment, staff and patients in busy hospital facilities.

RFID is now being used as an automation tool, much as it has been in industrial manufacturing, to monitor and manage critical process flows in hospitals and laboratories.  Central sterile and laboratory processes require the same checks and balances as complex assembly processes, after all.  Building a surgical kit, and managing the disinfection cycle of surgical instruments is not much different than kitting shipments in a manufacturing facility or managing materials in a clean room environment.

At the HIMSS show this month, we demonstrated a surgical instrument tracking application with RFID using a Motorola handheld reader and ruggedized tags from Xerafy.  It resulted in many interesting discussions on how process automation may be one of the hidden benefits of an Intelligent Hospital.

RFID and RTLS in Healthcare and Life Sciences [Infographic]

It's a common misconception that there's only one use case for RTLS and RFID in Healthcare: tracking hospital equipment across patient rooms.   We're seeing primary care providers, testing labs and pharmaceutical manufacturers implementing the technology for dozens of other use cases, within core operations and across the value chain.  The infographic below illustrates some of these applications.