Reducing Errors by RFID Technology to Achieve Lean Healthcare

Reducing wastes in the healthcare processes is crucial for developing a high performance health system. Adopted from the Toyota Production System (TPS), the Lean concept has emerged in recent years as a way of introducing innovative ideas to improve industrial processes. In the context of healthcare, Lean is considered as a continuous improvement model, which provides healthcare organization to identify and remove the wasteful activities. Implementation of Lean concept can benefit from the use of new technologies that facilitate management of patients, human resources, and inventories. RFID is one of these technologies, which can help removing non-value added activities in the healthcare processes by its traceability and real-time provision of information. The purpose of this paper was to systematically explore how healthcare organizations can take the advantage of RFID to optimize their process and create value added towards ultimately becoming Lean. We categorized the major advantages of RFID in the context of healthcare and the Lean scopes that can benefit from RFID, and discussed the relationship between the two concepts.