RFID Technology: An Overview for Hospitals
With 18 years in healthcare IT and 12 years in IoT development, ScienceSoft designs and develops robust medical IoT systems for RFID tracking of hospital assets, patients, and medical staff.
RFID in Hospitals: Overview
If used for hospital asset, medication, patient and staff tracking, RFID technology is bringing benefits by cutting operational costs, streamlining hospital workflows and asset utilization, reducing medical errors, and improving patient safety.
Hospital RFID Tracking Market in Brief
The global medical RFID technology market is expected to amount to $10.65 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 22.4%. The hospital RFID tech market boost is dictated by the increasing number of visits (due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the growing number of geriatric patients) and the need for more efficient hospital supply chain management.
How Medical RFID Tracking Works
Architecture
- RFID tags (active or passive) – attached to or embedded into hospital assets or tracking bracelets/badges for patients, visitors, staff and transmit information on their location to RFID readers.
- RFID readers – located in hospital corridors, wards, etc., they identify the location of RFID tags and send this data to the cloud gateway.
- Firewall – to securely transmit collected data to the cloud server.
- Streaming data processor – to transfer the input data about hospital assets, patients, staff, etc., to a data lake.
- Data lake – to store the data about tracked patients, staff, and hospital assets sent by RFID tags in its original format.
- Big data warehouse – to store filtered and preprocessed data for further analysis of hospital staff workflow efficiency, movements of patients, medical asset utilization, etc.
- Data analytics – to identify patterns and tendencies in hospital asset use and movements of tracked people and provide insights aimed at improving asset availability, medical staff schedules, patient safety, etc.
- RFID tracking software business logic – to process hospital asset requests and high-priority events (e.g., the patient leaves the hospital premises without being discharged), provide information on the location of patients, visitors, and staff members, etc.
- Staff application – to enable the medical staff, equipment technicians, etc., to view locations of hospital assets and request them for use, get information on patient location, get alerts on the unusual patient or visitor behavior. The application also helps supervisors view locations of each hospital unit employee, get insights on workflow optimization, etc.
- Admin application – to view the list of monitored assets, tracked patients, visitors, medical specialists and information about them, add new assets, staff members, edit key data about tracked items and people, grant access to the asset tracking system for the medical and administrative staff, etc.
Applications of RFID Technology in Hospitals
Equipped with RFID tags, all medical tools (disposable and/or reusable) and durable assets (beds, medical equipment) are monitored in the IoT tracking system to ensure their availability. The information on their location can be tracked by the medical staff using a mobile or web application with a facility map.
Medication inventory management
RFID-enabled medication inventory tracking enables hospitals to timely spot medication shortages and expiration, prevent theft, and ensure the intended use of medication (due to use instructions stored in the tracking system).
Patient tracking
RFID tracking helps medical staff to pinpoint the location of any patient in the hospital to ensure their safety and sustain the care process. Patient tracking is especially relevant in neonatal units, pediatric departments, mental health facilities, or for tracking geriatric patients.
Medical staff tracking
Medical specialists wear RFID-equipped bracelets or badges, and their locations and interactions are displayed for medical supervisors in IoT tracking software. This data helps the supervisors find the doctors or nurses in case of emergencies, identify bottlenecks in hospital workflows (e.g., lack of doctors in the ER), reduce overwork, etc.
Hospital visitors tracking
Hospitals can track visitors’ locations to ensure the safety of patients, prevent visitors from accessing surgery rooms or inventories, etc. Visitors are linked to patients and if the visitor is not located near the patient or in hospital common areas, an alert is sent to the hospital security.
Prediction of patient flow and hospital admission rates
Data accumulated in the RFID tracking system is analyzed to help hospitals predict patient flow, plan medical supply and equipment purchase, identify the hospital’s overall load, a load of its departments and individual doctors and nurses. Based on the analytics insights, the hospital management can adjust staff workflows, patient treatment schedules, surgeries plans, etc.
Storage of data about tracked people and assets
The system stores RFID tag information (a patient’s name, condition; a doctor’s position, name, working hours; a name of the patient for their visitor; an asset’s name, manufacturer, expiration date, etc.). Besides this information, the RFID tracking system stores real-time data on assets’ and people’s movements.
Location monitoring
Via the RFID tracking system, healthcare specialists can view the nearest medical equipment or medication they need and access data on the location of patients and their visitors to improve treatment quality (e.g., find a patient if they miss a diagnostic procedure), safety (e.g., in case of emergencies like fire), and security (e.g., for newborns). For hospital supervisors, the data on medical staff location and movements is available.
Tracking analytics and reporting
The tracking system analyses collected data about hospital asset use duration, asset demand, movements of the medical staff, patients, and visitors around the hospital, and their interactions with each other. The analyzed data helps identify trends in people’s behavior and asset use patterns and derive ways to improve staff schedules, bed allocation, security measures, workflow optimization, asset availability, etc. The trends are visualized on dashboards and reported to responsible personnel (e.g., head of a hospital department, supply chain manager).
Alerts on unusual behavior
To monitor and improve hospital and patient safety, responsible employees get alerts on the identified suspicious behavior. For example, if there is an abrupt change in a patient’s movements (e.g., a patient is not moving on the stairs for 15 minutes), the IoT system makes the conclusion about an incident and sends an alert to a nurse. If a staff member is working after hours, the app notifies their supervisor to warn about an increased possibility of medical errors.
Asset state monitoring
To avoid asset shortage and malfunction, the RFID tracking system stores the data on expiration dates of essential medication and disposable items, maintenance schedules for medical equipment, etc., and notifies responsible personnel on upcoming maintenance or expiration.
Patient-doctor interactions control
RFID tracking software collects information on interactions between medical staff and patients to ensure that in-person monitoring and patient care are provided on time and with the right frequency (especially relevant for behavioral health facilities).
RFID Tracking: Project Example by ScienceSoft
Customer
A US-based chain of behavioral health facilities for patients suffering from severe mental health issues.
Solution
A concept of the patient and staff tracking IoT solution to ensure continuous patient supervision and eliminate the risks of self-harm.
Project details
ScienceSoft’s team designed a solution that featured:
- A tracking dashboard with an integrated patient and staff location view, recent staff and patient activity.
- Floor plans of the behavioral facility with marked control areas, location of RFID readers, and locations of staff members and patients.
- Notifications about patients/staff members entering unsolicited areas, etc.
Technology Stack
Databases / data storages
SQL
Our Microsoft SQL Server-based projects include a BI solution for 200 healthcare centers, the world’s largest PLM software, and an automated underwriting system for the global commercial insurance carrier.
We’ve implemented MySQL for Viber, an instant messenger with 1B+ users, and an award-winning remote patient monitoring software.
NoSQL
Our Apache Cassandra consultants helped a leading Internet of Vehicles company enhance their big data solution that analyzes IoT data from 600,000 vehicles.
ScienceSoft has helped one of the top market research companies migrate its big data solution for advertising channel analysis to Apache Hive. Together with other improvements, this led tо 100x faster data processing.
We use HBase if your database should scale to billions of rows and millions of columns while maintaining constant write and read performance.
Cloud databases / data storages
AWS
We use Amazon Redshift to build cost-effective data warehouses that easily handle complex queries and large amounts of data.
We use Amazon DynamoDB as a NoSQL database service for solutions that require low latency, high scalability and always available data.
Azure
Azure SQL Database is great for handling large volumes of data and varying database traffic: it easily scales up and down without any downtime or disruption to the applications. It also offers automatic backups and point-in-time recoveries to protect databases from accidental corruption or deletion.
We leverage Azure Cosmos DB to implement a multi-model, globally distributed, elastic NoSQL database on the cloud. Our team used Cosmos DB in a connected car solution for one of the world’s technology leaders.
IoT data analytics
AWS
We use Amazon Redshift to build cost-effective data warehouses that easily handle complex queries and large amounts of data.
We use Amazon DynamoDB as a NoSQL database service for solutions that require low latency, high scalability and always available data.
Azure
We leverage Azure Cosmos DB to implement a multi-model, globally distributed, elastic NoSQL database on the cloud. Our team used Cosmos DB in a connected car solution for one of the world’s technology leaders.
Others
Our Apache Cassandra consultants helped a leading Internet of Vehicles company enhance their big data solution that analyzes IoT data from 600,000 vehicles.
We use HBase if your database should scale to billions of rows and millions of columns while maintaining constant write and read performance.
By request of a leading market research company, we have built a Hadoop-based big data solution for monitoring and analyzing advertising channels in 10+ countries.
A large US-based jewelry manufacturer and retailer relies on ETL pipelines built by ScienceSoft’s Spark developers.
Back-end programming languages
Practice
19 years
Projects
200+
Workforce
60+
Our .NET developers can build sustainable and high-performing apps up to 2x faster due to outstanding .NET proficiency and high productivity.
Practice
25 years
Projects
110+
Workforce
40+
ScienceSoft's Java developers build secure, resilient and efficient cloud-native and cloud-only software of any complexity and successfully modernize legacy software solutions.
Practice
10 years
Projects
50+
Workforce
30
ScienceSoft's Python developers and data scientists excel at building general-purpose Python apps, big data and IoT platforms, AI and ML-based apps, and BI solutions.
Practice
10 years
Workforce
100
ScienceSoft delivers cloud-native, real-time web and mobile apps, web servers, and custom APIs ~1.5–2x faster than other software developers.
Practice
16 years
Projects
170
Workforce
55
ScienceSoft's PHP developers helped to build Viber. Their recent projects: an IoT fleet management solution used by 2,000+ corporate clients and an award-winning remote patient monitoring solution.
Practice
4 years
ScienceSoft's developers use Go to build robust cloud-native, microservices-based applications that leverage advanced techs — IoT, big data, AI, ML, blockchain.
Front-end programming languages
Languages
Practice
21 years
Projects
2,200+
Workforce
50+
ScienceSoft uses JavaScript’s versatile ecosystem of frameworks to create dynamic and interactive user experience in web and mobile apps.
JavaScript frameworks
Practice
13 years
Workforce
100+
ScienceSoft leverages code reusability Angular is notable for to create large-scale apps. We chose Angular for a banking app with 3M+ users.
Workforce
80+
ScienceSoft achieves 20–50% faster React development and 50–90% fewer front-end performance issues due to smart implementation of reusable components and strict adherence to coding best practices.
By using a lightweight Vue framework, ScienceSoft creates high-performant apps with real-time rendering.
Mobile
Practice
16 years
Projects
150+
Workforce
50+
ScienceSoft’s achieves 20–50% cost reduction for iOS projects due to excellent self-management and Agile skills of the team. The quality is never compromised — our iOS apps are highly rated.
Practice
14 years
Projects
200+
Workforce
50+
There are award-winning Android apps in ScienceSoft’s portfolio. Among the most prominent projects is the 5-year-long development of Viber, a messaging and VoIP app for 1.8B users.
Practice
11 years
Projects
85+
Workforce
10+
ScienceSoft cuts the cost of mobile projects twice by building functional and user-friendly cross-platform apps with Xamarin.
ScienceSoft uses Cordova to create cross-platform apps and avoid high project costs that may come with native mobile development.
ScienceSoft takes the best from native mobile and web apps and creates the ultimate user experience in PWA.
Practice
8 years
Projects
300+
ScienceSoft reduces up to 50% of project costs and time by creating cross-platform apps that run smoothly on web, Android and iOS.
Challenge #1
Smart patient tracking software collects location data, stores and processes sensitive information (patient data, medical conditions, etc.) that can be compromised.
Challenge #2
Tracking can be interrupted if patients, medical specialists, visitors lose bracelets or badges with RFID tags.
Challenge #3
Daily hospital operations (e.g., sterilization of surgical tools, continuous use of tracking bracelets) may affect RFID tags, and the RFID tags may influence the performance of hospital equipment.
Core investment size factors
- Functionality scope of RFID tracking software (the cost of software combining asset, patient, and staff tracking will be higher than the cost of a patient tracking system).
- Feature complexity (e.g., implementation of advanced analytics increases the software cost).
- Using ready-made components (e.g., AWS IoT services) to build the RFID tracking system or going for 100% custom software development.
Cost factors associated with equipment
- RFID tags (active and/or passive).
- Embedding RFID tags into the tools, devices, etc.
- Setup of RFID equipment (readers).
- RFID readers.
Operational costs
- Cost of cloud services for the IoT system (e.g., for data analytics).
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On average, a hospital RFID software for medical equipment tracking costs around $200,000 – $250,000+ and the pricing for RFID tracking of patients and medical staff ranges from $150,000 to $250,000+. |
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Medical RFID Tracking Consulting and Development Services by ScienceSoft
In IoT software development since 2011, ScienceSoft offers its advisory and development expertise to create reliable medical RFID tracking software for hospital assets, patients, medical staff, and hospital visitors.
RFID tracking consulting
What we do:
- Elicit functional and non-functional requirements for RFID tracking software.
- Plan RFID tracking software functionality.
- Design a flexible high-level architecture and integrations of RFID tracking software and choose an efficient tech stack.
- Calculate the cost, ROI, and plan RFID tracking software delivery timelines.
- Provide regulatory compliance guidelines (e.g., for HIPAA, HITECH regulations).
Development of RFID tracking software
What we do:
- Detail an RFID tracking software concept based on your high-level ideas or detailed requirements.
- Plan RFID tracking software functionality.
- Design scalable IoMT-based software architecture and integrations.
- Choose a tech stack and hardware (e.g., RFID tags, readers).
- Develop and test RFID tracking software upon the agreed schedule.
- Help comply with relevant regulations (HIPAA, HITECH, etc.).
- Plan the locations of RFID tracking devices or set up the tracking equipment.
- Support and maintain software (if required).
About ScienceSoft
Headquartered in McKinney, Texas, US, ScienceSoft is an IT consulting and software development company certified according to ISO 13485 and ISO 27001 standards. With 18 years of experience in healthcare IT, we design and deliver medical software according to the requirements of the FDA and the Council of the European Union and offer robust IoT solutions to enable RFID tracking of hospital assets, patients, visitors, and staff.