Italian Hospital Uses RFID to Document Patient Location, Treatment

Each portal's RFID antennas are installed above a doorway. By monitoring the sequence in which the antennas pick up a tag's signal, the Siced software can determine the route a patient has taken, as well as the direction of movement. The hospital, located 40 kilometers from Milan, installed the system in September 2006, at a cost of about €100,000 ($71,400).

"RFID added value in terms of emergency patient management," Visentin says. Since its deployment, she adds, "the main goal has been achieved: guaranteeing the patient safety in such a critical area." The system also provides the hospital with a better understanding of patient flow in various departments, which it can then use to anticipate backups in specific areas.

According to Visentin, when the system was initially deployed, "the patients didn't understand the purpose of this technology." However, she says, hospital staff and families waiting for patients soon understood the benefit of being able to provide immediate information about the patients and their location.

The hospital provides a computer monitor in the emergency waiting room, on which a patient's family can key in that person's ID number and see exactly where he or she is located without having to ask hospital personnel. This, says Olivieri, enables the facility to better support the needs of patients' families.

"As well as providing the immediate localization of the patient," says Olivieri, "the other goal achieved, thanks to RFID, is the control of the time taken to cross the clinic area in comparison to the planned time." The staff employs the system to identify delays as a patient passes from one department to another.

All tag reads showing a particular patient's movement throughout the hospital are saved to that person's file, allowing staff to track any services the patient receives during his or her visit. When the patient is discharged, the tag is recovered so it can be reassigned to a newly admitted patient. The hospital uses a pool of 100 tags, continuously reused as patients check out. An average of 55,000 patients are admitted to the emergency department each year.