Application of RFID technology in the medical industry
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1. Project background analysis
In the complex working environment of hospitals and other medical institutions, real-time accurate positioning of important assets and personnel is often the key to improving the efficiency of medical services. For example, if you don’t know where the nearest oxygen tank is, or when you need the most suitable doctor, you don’t know where it is in the hospital (it’s not that doctors always carry mobile phones), etc. The “low visibility” of these important assets often leads to time and Serious waste of resources. Specifically, a medical institution that lacks a clear and clear asset and personnel management system will often cause the following problems:
1. Equipment loss: According to statistics, the annual loss of portable equipment is usually close to 20% due to misplacement, theft, etc.
2. Nursing staff, material supply and management, and clinicians need to spend a lot of energy every day to find the appropriate medical equipment needed
3. Delays in patient services: When the required doctors or equipment cannot be found in time, other staff and wards will become idle and cause the loss of opportunity to rescue the patients
4. Failure to quickly find suitable equipment will result in hospitals having to stock too many similar materials or temporarily lease additional equipment, most of which are either idle or inefficient in utilization
5. For those equipment that cannot be accurately located, preventive maintenance measures are often very untimely, putting them at the risk of expired use or overuse
6. The disease threat to themselves and others caused by some patients leaving the ward or entering other areas without permission
In response to the above-mentioned needs objectively existing in the medical industry, medical tracking solutions based on active RFID (electronic tag, radio frequency identification) technology came into being. Its core concept is “advanced technology, reliable products, and a visualized platform”.Based on activeRFIDThe industry application of (electronic tag, radio frequency identification) technology provides medical institutions at home and abroad with complete visualization solutions for assets, patients and staff, so as to help them provide daily operating efficiency, reduce operating costs, and improve medical service levels.
2. Introduction to the application scheme
In actual use, the internal structure of the application system will be ever-changing, but the deployment method of the RFID (electronic tag, radio frequency identification) system as a front-end data collection tool is similar: electronic tags are generally attached to assets, objects or personnel in a variety of ways. As its unique identification, it may collect other relevant data (such as blood pressure, temperature, etc.) and upload it to the reader. The reader transmits to the background host system in a wired or wireless manner. After specific program analysis, relevant useful information can be parsed and stimulated. The follow-up control mechanism of the application system.
(1) Electronic label
In the medical industry, electronic tags are mainly used in the identification and monitoring of assets, personnel and medical items. In terms of item identification, it is mainly at the level of important medical assets and medical item packaging boxes, and the single items will still be based on barcodes. In order to realize the real-time monitoring function, the current personnel tags and most asset tags in the hospital are mainly active. In order to better demonstrate the outstanding advantages of active technology, we will use active technology and passive technology in possible application requirements. Let’s make a comparison:
In terms of wearing objects, there are mainly hospital staff tags, patient tags, and asset tags.
1. Staff tag
Staff tags are generally card-shaped and worn on the neck. High-frequency or low-frequency chips can be integrated for access control according to actual needs, that is, the dual-frequency card we usually use. In some occasions with higher security levels, biometric technologies such as fingerprints and iris can be set up to strictly manage the entry and exit of personnel.
2. Patient label
The patient tag is generally in the shape of a wristband, which can be conveniently worn on the patient’s wrist. The entire label adopts anti-tear technology, if it is forcibly damaged, it can take the initiative to report to the police. Different patient categories need to develop different label packaging styles: ordinary patients only need ordinary wristband labels, which are only used for identification purposes; some special patients also need to integrate pulse and body temperature sensors. These data will be used for hospitals to carry out related medical treatment. The service provides help; all tags can also have an alarm function, add 1-2 emergency buttons on the surface of the tag, and you can call for help at any time in case of emergencies. In addition, in the application of newborn mother-to-child identification, baby labels will adopt special clean packaging measures.
3. Asset tags
Asset tags often come in a variety of packaging styles, most of which are strip-shaped tags, which are attached to medical equipment or article packaging. Asset tags will vary according to different uses. General medical devices only need to be bound with ordinary tags for identification purposes only. Some assets that often need to be repeatedly searched and located need to be bound to tags with flashing functions with LED lights. Provide visual assistance in finding specific assets.
Some items that are more “fragile” to the storage environment, such as vaccines, plasma, etc., require active tags for real-time monitoring and continuous collection of their temperature and humidity characteristics. If a certain feature exceeds the preset range, the active tag needs to make a special identification or alarm for the batch of items. Therefore, asset tags of such materials need to integrate sensor functions.
(2) Reader
According to the different ways of interacting with the back-end database data,Reader(Also called information collector) can be divided into base station reader and handheld reader.
Base station type readers are usually distributed in some specific areas, such as corridors, doorways, aisles, etc., with fixed locations as the basis for address information during background data analysis. The base station reader is connected to the antenna, searches for various data actively sent by the tag in the target area and transmits it to the background server through wired or wireless means. The reader and the antenna can be integrated into one, or the antenna can be externally installed according to the actual situation to adapt to the signal coverage in a specific environment.
Compared with base station readers, handheld readers are more flexible to use, and can be carried by staff or bound to a mobile asset as a data forwarding station. Medical staff often need to inspect the patients in their respective areas to ensure that the patients are in a normal state of care. In addition, it is very convenient to use a handheld reader to search for some important items in a large and spacious area (such as a warehouse).
(3) Application system
The hospital information system (HIS) that integrates RFID (electronic tag, radio frequency identification) technology will significantly improve the efficiency of hospital asset operation and the level of medical services. Judging from the current domestic situation, the following applications are relatively mature:
1. Medical monitoring
In many hospitals, there are a large number of emergency patients every day, especially in some large emergency centers. When a mass accident occurs, a large number of wounded will rush into the hospital. At this time, every minute and second is extremely precious, and it cannot tolerate the slightest. error. However, the condition of each wounded person is very similar, which is easy to confuse, and the traditional manual registration is not only slow and error rate is high, it is impossible to register normally for critically ill patients. In order to quickly confirm the identity of all patients, complete the admission registration and carry out step-by-step follow-up emergency work, the medical department urgently needs an automatic identification system that can provide real-time identification and condition information of the wounded. Only in this way can the hospital staff be efficient and effective. Carry out rescue work accurately and orderly.
The specific application method is to wear a wrist tag for each patient. When the patient receives a diagnosis and treatment, the medical staff only needs to scan the tag information with a handheld reader to know the first-aid items that need to be performed, such as whether infusion is needed, the name of the drug injected, and the Specifications, treatment items that have been performed, whether there are adverse reactions, etc., all data will be displayed in front of medical staff in less than a second, so that they can check medical procedures and drug specifications and quantities. The patient tag can also store all treatment processes and medication injection records. Because RFID (electronic tag, radio frequency identification) technology provides a reliable, efficient, and economical method of information storage and inspection, the hospital’s rescue of emergency patients will not be delayed, and there will be no accidents caused by the wrong identification of the wounded. In addition, in the case of transfer for treatment, the patient’s data, including medical history, type of injury, proposed treatment method, treatment location, treatment status, etc., can be made into a new label and sent to the next treatment hospital. Because the input of all these information can be completed at one time by reading the radio frequency tag, unnecessary manual input is reduced and human errors are avoided.
2. Newborn identification management application
Newborn babies have similar characteristics and lack of understanding and expression skills. If they are not effectively labeled, they will often cause misidentification, and the result will have an irreparable and huge impact on all parties. Therefore, the identification of newborns must realize the function of patient identification. At the same time, mother and baby are matched. Separate identification of infants has management loopholes and cannot prevent malicious artificial replacement. Therefore, it is best to identify both the newborn baby and its mother, and use the same code to connect the biological mother and child. Infant care is carried out between the hospital staff and the mother, and during temporary transfers, both parties should conduct inspections at the same time to ensure the correct mother-child pairing.
After the baby is born, the mother and baby should be identified in the delivery room immediately, and the mother and the baby should be transferred out of the delivery room before other patients are sent to the delivery room. The delivery room must be prepared: two non-transferable RFID (electronic tag, radio frequency identification) identification tapes for mothers and newborns. The information on the label should be the same, including the mother’s full name and label number, the baby’s gender, the date and time of birth, and what other hospitals think can clearly match the biological mother and child. A device that can clearly capture baby’s footprints and mother’s fingerprints. Appropriate forms record relevant information and footprint data. In addition to marking, it can also fully guarantee the safety of the marked object. When someone tries to steal a newborn baby out of a hospital ward, RFID (electronic tag, radio frequency identification) identification equipment can detect it in real time and issue an alarm, and notify the security staff of the latest location of the stolen baby.
3. Application for tracking and locating important hospital assets and materials
Some large medical centers generally have huge storage bases for important medical assets and medical items. Hospital logistics personnel need to find suitable items from thousands of materials according to orders every day. The outer packaging of medical articles is usually similar, but the purpose of the inner articles is quite different. Therefore, the hospital logistics department usually needs to spend a lot of manpower and material resources to find and check these articles. Moreover, the storage of medical items must be carried out in accordance with strict storage specifications. Misplacement incidents often occur when warehouse adjustments or items are moved, causing extensive damage to items or serious drug accidents after they are circulated to the market.
The use of RFID (electronic tag, radio frequency identification) tags with LED lights will make this search and verification process extremely fast and accurate, and the tags themselves can carry item-related information, which can increase the speed of the entire verification process by about 20 times. In addition, if some items are misplaced, the system can remind the warehouse manager to adjust the storage location through flashing LED lights.
4. Hospital contact history tracking control application
Combining the infectious disease epidemic tracking control system and the medical hospital contact history RFID (electronic tag, radio frequency identification) tracking control system, epidemic prevention and government units can instantly and accurately grasp the dynamic information of the entire processing process, thereby preventing similar atypical pneumonia epidemics The problem of nosocomial infection control recurred.
Home quarantine and infectious waste generated in medical hospitals, at the same time that the health unit issues the home quarantine notice, the global positioning system is used to track and control the transportation of special garbage trucks throughout the whole process, and the relevant units can instantly grasp the whereabouts of the garbage trucks, and when abnormalities occur It can be corrected immediately to prevent spreading. Most importantly, transparent dynamic tracking information can eliminate people’s doubts.
5. Management application of pharmaceutical supply chain
In the medical field, a large number of errors in prescriptions, drug delivery, and medication take place every year, leading to many medical accidents, a large number of lost hours and legal proceedings. According to statistics, the losses in these areas are as high as 75 billion US dollars each year. Improved drug tracking methods may help hospitals save costs and curb the proliferation of counterfeit and substandard drugs, which currently account for 10% of the global drug market.
Smart tags, or radio frequency identification (RFID (electronic tag, radio frequency identification))-through the use of this tag, physical objects can be identified at any point in the manufacturing and distribution process. In the process of eliminating the usually slow and inefficient sales and distribution processes, RFID (electronic tags, radio frequency identification) will play a key role, and it will help pharmaceutical companies prepare for the future and enable them to produce varieties in small batches. More and more complex products. It can also monitor drugs at all nodes in the supply chain, including accurate target batch delivery, thereby helping pharmaceutical companies meet increasing regulatory requirements.
From the above application situation, the application of RFID (electronic tag, radio frequency identification) in the medical industry has surpassed the concept of fast search and location. The hospital HIS system that integrates RFID (electronic tag, radio frequency identification) technology will integrate all the assets of the hospital into An organic whole provides fast, efficient and reliable services to patients.
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