Pictures of the Future      Fall 2005

Calling all Patients

Tomorrow’s patients will wear wristbands outfitted with tiny radio labels, thus allowing clinics to organize processes more efficiently. Pilot projects in New York and Saarbrücken, Germany are demonstrating how the labels help prevent identification and treatment errors.

An the future, patients at Saarbrücken Hospital in southwestern Germany will be issued wristbands that ensure reliable identification. The goal is to make issuing of medications in hospitals more reliable than ever, while ensuring that patients won’t be confused with one another or receive incorrect prescriptions. The thin wristbands contain a tiny radio label in which patient data is stored. The RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) labels consist of a data chip and an ultra-thin antenna coil (see RFID Applications).

The Right Dose. To retrieve data, a doctor or nurse simply holds a pocket or tablet computer equipped with an RFID reading unit near the patient’s wrist. The unit sends a radio signal to the wristband, calling up the stored information and ensuring reliable identification of the patient in question. At the same time, the pocket PC uses a WLAN radio link to access complete patient data from the hospital’s central computer, obtaining an overview of previously prescribed medications and doses.

For some time now, physicians in Saarbrücken have been working with a computer program for medications that automatically determines if side effects could occur in situations where a patient is taking several different medications, or whether a patient’s age or medical condition might preclude the use of certain types of medicine. Until now, however, doctors haven’t had direct access to the system from the patient’s bedside, which meant there was no way to rule out the possibility that the wrong medication might be prescribed.

That’s why the clinic opted for the RFID solution. For one thing, RFID guarantee that patients will not be incorrectly identified—something that can happen all too easily when paper files are inadvertently switched. What’s more, doctors can now access a patient’s medication program within seconds to determine whether a drug they want to prescribe might produce a negative effect in combination with medications already being taken by the patient.

The RFID program began in Saarbrücken in mid-2005, and a total of 1,000 patients will soon have been given the units. The project partner for the radio wristbands is Siemens Business Services (SBS), whose specialized staff in Munich were responsible for programming the hospital’s pocket PCs and creating the interface and WLAN network for the connection to its central computer.

Reliable Identification. The RFID system in use at Saarbrücken is based on knowledge that SBS gained during pilot project for radio labels, which was conducted at Jacobi Medical Center in New York. "The RFID project launched in New York in the summer of 2004 impressed Jacobi’s doctors and nurses so much that the hospital decided to implement it as a regular system in the spring of 2005," says Thomas Jell of SBS, who is responsible for both projects.

In New York, Jacobi’s initial aim was to ensure reliable identification of all patients. Prior to the project, patients received standard paper wristbands with ID numbers that staff had to type into pocket computers every time they visited a patient. But despite the ID numbers, incorrect data entries led to patient identification mix-ups and prescription problems.

The hospital obviously needed an electronic solution. The first decision was in favor of bar codes, which were being used in other areas of the medical center. But the advantages of RFID labels were simply too great for the medical center’s administration to ignore. Unlike bar code labels, RFID labels aren’t susceptible to damage by humidity or scratching, both of which can make bar codes unreadable. RFID labels, on the other hand, can even be read through bed covers.

According to Daniel Morreale, director of data processing at Jacobi Medical Center, the RFID solution helps to save time and reduce paperwork. Morreale is even thinking of expanding the system—for example, to include monitoring heart disease patients. Here, a sensor that measures pulse rate could be linked to the radio chip, which would then send the data to the nurses’ station. If pulse were to deteriorate dramatically, the device would transmit an alarm—even if the patient was not in bed.
                                                                                                                Tim Schröder