The Critical Issues about Deploying RFID in Healthcare Industry by Service Perspective

Although the Hospital Information Systems (HIS) have been rapidly deployed in hospital and clinical management, there are still some obstacles existed in integrating object flow and information flow within HIS architecture. Deploying Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology could provide advantages indentifying, tracking and tracing objects to provide high medical quality service and promote value-added operation efficiency. Taiwan government has heavily advocated and even taken the initiates for the RFID deployment in healthcare industry. Over years, there are hospitals have deployed pilot projects with an intent to verify and evaluate the potential of RFID applications in healthcare service. However, some of the pilot sites were terminated due to resource shortage; some manages to more to the next phases. Case study methodology was applied in this study by interviewing ten experts who have actively participated in different projects. The results indicate that the critical key factors on RFID deployment in healthcare applications are not only technological concern, but also the value-added service perspective on the technology, in particular the value proposition on RFID adoption, diffusion and system integration.