RFID – On the March in the Health Sector.

More RFID news this week

RFID, Radio Location Service Use Soaring at Hospitals

A new study shows hospitals are aggressively deploying a range of active and some passive radio-frequency identification...

John Cox, Network World

Wednesday, August 20, 2008 12:50 PM PDT

A new study shows hospitals are aggressively deploying a range of active and some passive radio-frequency identification systems.

The payback no longer is simply being able to find medical equipment including wheelchairs. Increasingly, wireless identification and location data is being used to streamline and repair a range of healthcare workflows and business processes.

The study, "Trends in RFID 2008," is based on 100 telephone interviews earlier this year with IT professionals and clinical and nursing directors at hospitals with typically 300 or more beds. It was carried out by Greg Malkary, founder and managing director of Spyglass Consulting Group, a market-intelligence and research firm in California.

A previous Spyglass study was done in 2005. Since then, the number of RFID-based applications has tripled, Malkary found. "A few years ago, they were trialing [RFID] technology, with a few hundred objects being tracked," he says. Now there are large-scale product deployments rolling out, tracking thousands of objects in multiple locations.

Harrisburg Hospital in Pennsylvania deployed a patient-tracking system from PeriOptimum for surgical patients, then expanded the 433MHz wireless infrastructure from Lawrence, Mass.-based Radianse to track wheelchairs and a wide range of portable medical gear. By the end of 2008, the hospital plans to have nearly 10,000 wireless tags deployed. As at Harrisburg, many of these applications are "active RFID" -- with a radio embedded in a tag that's able to transmit a signal on its own. These products use a variety of frequency bands, and in some cases are Wi-Fi based. Passive RFID tags lack a radio: When they come near a tag reader, the reader's radio activates the tag, which reflects some of the signal's energy back to the reader, carrying with it the tag's unique ID number.

Early applications, such as infant-tracking systems, are giving way to staff tracking, combined with time-motion studies to optimize workflows in such areas as radiology and surgical departments. "You can see where people are and figure out how they're spending their time," Malkary says. The 2008 interviewees linked RFID data to quality-improvement programs, such as Six Sigma.

One notable technology shift is healthcare's willingness to embrace multiple wireless technologies. The 2005 Spyglass study found that 90% of respondents were unwilling to invest in wireless that didn't use their existing wireless LAN (WLAN) or corporate backbones. "Today they are much more open to multiple technology investments to get increased levels of [location] accuracy," Malkary says.

Accuracy varies. Wi-Fi location systems are accurate enough to place tagged objects or people in general areas. However, some applications need more precision or more control, or both: to determine whether high-value drugs are in a refrigerator, for example, or whether high-value medical equipment is in a sterilization room. Using proprietary radios in other frequency bands, or passive RFID systems are alternatives.

One example is a project from the University of Wisconsin-Madison RFID LAB, which has partnered with a trio of national blood centers to use RFID to manage the complete blood-supply chain for blood used in transfusions, as well as associated medications. The goal is to improve the safety, efficiency and accuracy of the U.S. blood supply.

Many more examples here

http://www.pcworld.com/article/150075/rfid_radio_location_service_use_soaring_at_hospitals.html

and – for a more general perspective

RFID Redux

by Jeffrey Rothfeder

8/12/08

No longer the tech darling, RFID is slowly reemerging as a valuable way to monitor small pieces of big supply chains.

A few years ago, radio frequency identification (RFID) was the technology du jour and touted as a way to make supply chains transparent, from manufacturing through point-of-sale.

With RFID, individual tags embedded with identification data are placed on components, materials, finished goods, cartons, boxes, pallets, or any other type of shipping and packaging materials. Electronic readers at warehouses, retail outlets, assembly lines, and checkout counters continually scan these items, sending their IDs and locales to centralized databases, where this information is translated into up-to-the-second snapshots of supply chain activity. Such a clear view, it was hoped, would minimize the expense of lost items, theft, and unstocked shelves, as well as significantly improve factory efficiency. Indeed, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., and the U.S. Department of Defense grew so enamored of the prospects for this technology that they told their contractors and suppliers to place RFID tags on items by January 2005 or risk losing their massive contracts.

These mandates went unheeded, or at least failed to engender the desired results. Only five Wal-Mart distribution centers have been RFID-enabled, seven fewer than the retailer had initially planned. And after suppliers complained that the tags were too expensive to purchase and the technology was balky, Wal-Mart and the Pentagon relaxed their directives so that now only the largest suppliers are required to adopt RFID.

But if RFID is not quite the behemoth it was initially predicted to be, it is nonetheless proving itself effective in smaller-scale, closed-loop applications, which is boosting its prospects again. According to IDtechEx Inc., an RFID industry analyst, in 2008 the value of the entire RFID market will reach US$5.3 billion, up from $4.9 billion the year before. And the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers estimates that the market will grow to over $25 billion by 2017.

RFID’s renewed popularity has been spurred on by recent applications:

• Land Rover Group Ltd. implemented RFID in some of its factories to keep track of vehicles as they leave the assembly line for testing and refinement. This system reduced the labor costs involved in looking for “lost” vehicles, assured faster order-to-cash cycles, and decreased inventory carrying expenses. Land Rover realized a full return on investment within nine months.
• Hong Kong International Airport, which handles nearly 50 million passengers and 4 million tons of cargo a year, has installed an RFID system to monitor baggage within the facility from the time the passenger gives a bag to the clerk to the moment it is placed in the belly of a plane. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) says that RFID baggage handling systems are correct nearly 99 percent of the time, whereas bar code readers have only an 80 to 90 percent accuracy rate. The IATA says that full RFID implementation in airports could generate as much as $760 million in industry savings per year.
• Beginning in 2006, Gillette Company placed RFID tags on all of the cases and pallets of its new Fusion razor that were shipped to 400 retailers with RFID readers in their storage facilities. When the databank showed the products had reached a store’s back room but were not placed on shelves for sale in a timely manner, Gillette would call and request that the product be moved out quickly. With this strategy, Gillette says, Fusion razors are placed on store shelves 90 percent faster than they were before; the company predicts a 25 percent return on its RFID investment by 2016.

More here:

http://www.strategy-business.com/li/leadingideas/li00088

It seems there are essentially an infinite number of ways these little tags can be used – constrained only by the imagination of those with business tracking, matching and counting problems.

It is good to see at least some technologies are living up to their promise.

David.