Title: RFID-based patient tracking for regional collaborative healthcare

Authors: Qurban A. Memon; Shakeel A. Khoja

Addresses: Electrical Engineering Department, UAE University, Al-Ain, UAE. ' Faculty of Computer Science, Institute of Business Administration, Karachi, Pakistan

Abstract: Hospitals typically deploy automation of their services to streamline their operations. Despite this, however, it has been found that patients do suffer from queuing at reception, pharmacy, and services departments of the hospitals. Additionally, hospitals within a region of a country develop and maintain independent medical files of each patient, and thus patients have to go through tests and examinations at each hospital if they are on the move. In this paper, radio frequency identification based patient tracking is presented such that it enables not only presence of the patient within each service area, but also helps in retrieving relevant medical records of the patient from another hospital within a collaborative domain. In this paper, a framework is presented for such a collaborative region. The patient record database is developed, technologies are chosen and role-based access is exemplified for a typical environment. The advantages and issues related to its deployment are also discussed.

Keywords: patient tracking; smart hospitals; regional healthcare; RFID; radio frequency identification; collaborative healthcare; collaboration; medical records; medical information; information retrieval; patient records.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.2012.051123

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 2012 Vol.45 No.4, pp.231 - 244

Published online: 20 Dec 2012 *

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