Throughout the past few months, I’ve noticed a clear trend in the story pitches that reporter Claire Swedberg and I have received: a growing number of them have involved hospitals and the healthcare sector. The majority of announcements, before 2020, pertained to retail, but that has seemingly changed. Solutions and use cases for healthcare, utilizing radio frequency identification, ultra-wideband, Bluetooth Low Energy, Wi-Fi, LoRaWAN and other Internet of Things (IoT)-related technologies, are on the rise as the world strives to survive the onslaught of COVID-19.
That’s to be expected during a pandemic that has, to date, seen 105 million people around the world infected in less than a year. Almost 2.3 million of those cases have proved fatal, and more than 450,000 of them (one-fifth of the planet’s total death toll) have been in the United States. RFID and related technologies have been invaluable tools in tracking vaccine manufacturing and distribution, enforcing social distancing, enabling contact tracing, monitoring patients’ vital signs for physicians remotely, and more, and the industry is taking advantage of such technologies’ benefits.
It’s difficult, of course, to garner enthusiasm for the growing adoption of technologies when that growth has come at the heartbreaking—and, to some extent, avoidable—cost of so many lives. Still, the healthcare field has been making strong use of IoT-related solutions and services in combatting the coronavirus and keeping the population alive to receive vaccinations. If there’s any silver lining to be found in the dark cloud under which we’ve been living since the start of 2020, at least there’s that.
So it wasn’t surprising to me when a new report from ResearchAndMarkets.com, titled “US RTLS for Healthcare Market Forecast to 2027,” revealed that the U.S. market for real-time location system (RTLS) solutions is expected to reach $2.34 billion by 2027. This represents a substantial amount of growth, as the U.S. RTLS market for healthcare was $575 million in 2019, shortly before the pandemic began. In other words, according to the report’s data, the market is expected to quadruple within the next several years.
“Hospitals and clinics offer various services through a single building,” the research team explained, “including diagnosing rooms, patient rooms, operating rooms, imaging centers and much more. Therefore, keeping track of records for every patient for many years is a complicated task. However, the use of RTLS in the healthcare industry has reduced the burden of work challenges. The advantages have allowed increasing adoption of RTLS across the country. Various medical centers have adopted RTLS services and are expected to increase in the coming near future.”
A recent study conducted by Zebra Technologies, titled “2022 Hospital Vision Study,” bears this out. According to that report’s authors, the use of RTLS solutions for tracking patients is expected to grow from 58 percent in 2017 to 96 percent by next year. Moreover, Zebra’s research indicates, the technology’s use for monitoring specimen data will increase from 47 percent to 98 percent, medical device tracking will grow from 44 percent to 98 percent, equipment monitoring will be boosted from 41 percent to 96 percent, and the tracking of staff records will jump from 40 percent to 97 percent.
Those adopting RTLS and similar technologies, according to the above two studies, include pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms, research organizations, manufacturers and more. These types of healthcare end users require thorough records for management and employees, and they face audits from state and federal regulatory bodies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, US Pharmacopoeia, and the Food and Drug Administration.
The COVID-19 outbreak has highly disrupted nations’ socio-economies around the globe, but according to the research, it has positively affected various businesses in the United States and abroad, with the RTLS healthcare market experiencing significant growth opportunities. The need for social distancing has contributed heavily to the increasing use of RTLS technologies, which have also enabled hospitals to monitor temperatures, environmental conditions, hand-hygiene compliance and other factors.
Such solutions also facilitate the scheduling, management and monitoring of workflows, at a time when hospital personnel are being strained beyond the limits of human endurance. I’m sure I’m not alone in looking forward to the day when the majority of the world’s population has been vaccinated against COVID-19 and we can all begin to get back to some sense of normalcy, particularly those in the healthcare field and on the front line. In the meantime, it’s at least some comfort that RFID, RTLS and related technologies are helping hospitals protect people from the pandemic.
Rich Handley has been the managing editor of RFID Journal since 2005. Outside the RFID world, Rich has authored, edited or contributed to numerous books about pop culture.