RFID Health System Preparedness ...

Addressing Surge Capacity in a Mass Casualty Event: Surge Capacity and Health System Preparedness--Transcript of Web Conference

... "Forward movement and tracking of patients from the event location to the hospital to post-hospital locations is a critical issue, says Rick. To what extent is tracking technology such as bar coding and RFID (radio frequency ID) tags being incorporated into these protocols? Please give examples. Who would like to take this question that came by E-mail.

Dr. Michael Shannon: I could begin because it's something that we've been looking at quite a bit at Childrens' Hospital in Boston. The program that we've faced so far, and I suspect that it's going to be true for most hospitals, is that information services, the decisions to decide what applications to purchase and to utilize is usually a very large expensive campaign that takes many years of thought, and it's not as easy as you may think, to simply incorporate a new system such as a bar code and bar code reading program. So we have found that a real challenge. What we're hoping to do right now is to begin to find a way to use photographs rather than the bar code technology, to simply find a way to incorporate digital photograph into patient identifiers. And it just fortunately happens that the information systems that our hospital is using, and the vendor is going to be one that can utilize digital photographs. But it really is key." ...