New Opportunities for RFID Smart Healthcare under Covid-19

When the COVID-19 suddenly appeared, contactless became a hot topic. RFID technology, as a kind of contactless technology, attracted much attention from the market. In the future, RFID IoT technology will play a huge role in the fields of smart manufacturing, logistics traceability, smart healthcare, municipal management, smart transportation, smart retail, and smart inspection, and is forming a “contactless economy”.

Various application technologies such as the IoT, wireless transmission, identification and authentication have been well used under the epidemic situation, and under the current epidemic situation, enterprises have extended more IoT solutions, such as thermal imaging temperature detection, human The face recognition access control system uses drones and robots to monitor key areas and cargo transportation. These IoT products and solutions have gained a lot of popularity during the resumption of work during the epidemic, and RFID tag-based IoT solutions have been applied in retail, warehousing, and industry. Contactless management is the main feature of RFID IoT solutions. During the epidemic, RFID temperature sensing tags for unmanned stores, unmanned vending machines, and hospitals, warehouse management tags manufactured by factories, and RFID tag identification for unmanned logistics. These applications also reflect the advantages of RFID tag-based solutions. Contactless management can not only ensure the safety of use, prevent pollution, but also avoid losses due to lack of personnel or human error.

From this perspective, the epidemic has a certain stimulating effect on the IoT. Although production capacity has not fully recovered, demand will not disappear. Judging from the feedback from the industry, the UHF RFID tag shipment volume, which is currently the largest in the industry, is growing at a rate of 20-30% every year. This growth rate is not undesirable. According to the survey results, the global annual UHF RFID tag shipments are between 15 billion and 18 billion. Coupled with high-frequency, low-frequency, and other types of RFID products, the overall RFID application volume is much higher than other IoT products.

Smart healthcare is a combination of Internet, computer, intelligent sensing, communication, remote sensing, satellite positioning, geographic information system and other technologies to achieve a subversive revolution in the intelligent identification, positioning, tracking, monitoring and management of all items. Among them, RFID technology is also involved in medical treatment, such as RFID wristband, so what are the advantages of RFID smart medical and what role do they play in the medical field? Please check following in detail:

A, Merits of Smart Healthcare

1. View health information at any time
Through the intelligent information system to collect user’s health information, case views, etc., people can get all their health information anytime, anywhere

2. Portable payment
It will shift from a project-based payment system to an evaluation system based on health value, use data to speak, realize value-based performance evaluation, and promote reforms to address the symptoms.

B, The application of Smart Medical

1. Medical monitoring
Many hospitals are found, and there are a large number of emergency patients every day. Especially in some large emergency centers, when a collective accident occurs, a large number of wounded people will flood into the hospital. A little mistake. However, in the case of a collective accident, the condition of each wounded person is very similar, and it is easy to confuse. Moreover, the traditional manual registration is not only slow but also has a high error rate, and it is impossible to register normally for critical patients. In order to be able to quickly identify all patients, complete admission registration and effectively carry out first aid, the medical department urgently needs an automatic identification system that can provide the identity and condition information of the wounded in real time. Only in this way can hospital staff be efficient, accurate and Rescue in an orderly manner.

Specific application method: wear a RFID wristband tag for each patient. When the patient receives diagnosis and treatment, the medical staff only needs to scan the RFID bracelet information with a hand-held reader to know the first aid items that need to be performed, such as: whether infusion or injection drugs are needed The product name, specifications, the treatment items that have been performed, whether there are adverse reactions, etc., all the data will be displayed in front of the medical staff in less than one second, so that they can check the medical procedures and drug specifications, quantity, etc. The patient label can also store all the treatment process and drug injection records. Because RFID 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 misrecognition of the wounded and resulting in medical accidents. In addition, in the case of transfer to hospital, the patient’s data, including medical history, type of injury, proposed treatment method, treatment site, treatment status, etc., can be made into new RFID bracelet tag and transmitted to the next attending hospital. Since the input of these information can be completed by reading the RFID wristband tag at one time, unnecessary manual entry is reduced, and human-made errors are avoided.

2. Application of 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 packaging of medical items is usually similar, but the use of internal items is very different. Therefore, the hospital logistics department usually needs a lot of manpower and resources to find and check these items. Moreover, the storage of medical items must be carried out in accordance with strict storage regulations. Misplacement events often occur during warehouse adjustments or item movements, resulting in large-scale damage to the items or serious drug accidents after circulation to the market.

The use of RFID 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 the blinking LED lights.

3. Application of tracking control of hospital contact history
Combined with the infectious disease epidemic situation tracking control system and medical institution contact history RFID tracking control system, each epidemic prevention and government unit can grasp the dynamic information of the entire processing process in real time and accurately, thereby preventing the epidemic situation such as SARS and new coronary pneumonia from being controlled in the hospital The problem happened again.

4. Management and application of pharmaceutical supply chain
In the medical field, a large number of errors in prescriptions, drug distribution, and medications occur every year, resulting in many medical accidents, a large number of lost time and legal proceedings. According to statistics, the losses caused in these areas are as high as 75 billion US dollars each year. Improving drug tracking methods may help hospitals save costs and curb the proliferation of counterfeit and shoddy drugs, which currently account for 10% of the global drug market.

5. Newborn logo management application
Newborn babies have similar characteristics and lack of understanding and expression skills. If they are not effectively marked, they will often lead to misidentification, and the result will have an irreparable impact on all parties. Therefore, in addition to the function of patient identification, the identification of newborns should be a match between the mother and the baby. There is a management flaw in the identification of the baby alone, and malicious malicious exchanges cannot be prevented. Therefore, it is best to label both newborn babies and their mothers, and use the same code to link the biological information of the mother and child. Baby care is performed between hospital staff and mothers, and when they are transferred temporarily, both parties should carry out inspections at the same time to ensure correct mother-child pairing.

After the baby is born, the mother and baby should be identified in the delivery room, and both the mother and the baby should be transferred out of the delivery room before other patients are admitted to the delivery room. The delivery room must be prepared: two non-transferable RFID identification tapes for the mother and the newborn. The information on the label should be the same, including the full name of the mother and the number of the label, the gender of the baby, the date and time of birth, and what other hospitals believe can clearly match the mother and child. Equipment that can clearly take baby foot prints and mother finger prints. Appropriate forms record relevant information and footprint information. In addition to the identification, it can also fully guarantee the safety of the identification object. When someone attempts to steal the newborn from the hospital ward, the RFID identification device can detect it in real time and issue an alarm, and notify the security personnel of the latest location of the stolen baby.

It can be seen that Internet medical not only can greatly reduce the chance of cross-infection, but also can effectively mobilize off-site medical resources in a timely manner to alleviate the shortage of medical resources in some areas.

After undergoing the test of this public health event, Smart Healthcare has embarked on a new track of accelerated progress. The penetration and improvement of smart medical care in health, old-age care and social welfare guarantees have opened up new paths.