Framework to Build an Intelligent RFID System for Use in the Healthcare Industry

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has been considered an important avenue for ensuring patients´ good health, full social participation, and independent living as long as possible through their entire life span. In the last decade, various ICT solutions were developed to facilitate medical organizations in sharing critical information about patients, to enable patients to monitor their health, and to prevent errors in medications. Currently, there is increasing interest in using the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to save lives, to prevent errors, and to reduce costs. Medical organizations have adopted RFID tags to track and manage medical assets to improve their utilization and to reduce the need for future expenditures on duplicating equipment. To improve patient safety and medical service, some are using RFID for tracking and tracing patients while they are in a hospital environment, for integrating with medical monitoring equipment for emergency alerts and for ensuring the removal of tagged items of surgical equipment during an operation. As product and patient safety are global concerns, tracking and tracing legitimate drugs using RFID tags are being mandated by government agencies around the world. Although using RFID can provide trustworthy benefits in the healthcare industry, it is not being widely used due to the lack of security on the RFID tags and limited space for data storage. To tackle such concerns, we propose an integrated framework to build a RFID card system by embedding smart tags in insurance cards, medical charts, and medical bracelets to store medical information. It will simplify the maintenance and transfer of patient data in a secure, feasible and cost effective way.