The Development of RFID in Healthcare in Taiwan

Healthcare industry has unique characteristic about human’s life. Any mistake or medical error will cause the irretrievable regret. Patient safety is the most important issue in recent years. Because the uncertainly of disease occur, the demand of healthcare need, location and types are changed frequently. By the presure of “Self Management Plan”, how to make limited healthcare more effectiveness and effecency is critical for survival. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) can be able to provide to identify, tracking and tracing for patient or medical objects directly and continuously. RFID is made object wisdom and process automation. It debase the cost of collect data from first-line in tradition MIS. RFID in Taiwan is more famous. There are four kinds of applications in healthcare industry. Some of them will be the killer application when government’s policy trigger and industry full-scale implement in the future. There are six hospitals deploy RFID in pilot plans by government support. And there are still some necks of bottle in deployment. The research assisted by foreign research and extracts by the experience in expert interview. We point out the critical deployment factors by five dimensions, including: system technology (system readable rate, frequency limitation, instrument interference & Human healthy, and transmission distance), system cost, common standard, health industry infrastructure and system integrate, and the issues in privacy and security by patient. The future research tries to find out the total solution to deploy RFID in healthcare industry to build up the” patient safety healthcare environment”.