Evaluation of Radio Frequency Identification in Hospitals Operations

Abstract

The health system is quite complex because its process includes medicines, supplies, but patients either. Information about them involves privacy, registration, storage and analysis. Besides, equipment, medicines and supplies need a storage organization because its absence leads to high costs and waste of resources. With the intention of reducing these problems, some information technologies (IT), such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), improve material traceability, information recording, and increased accuracy. Information technologies (IT) demand evaluation, considering that they can be underestimated in a company, due to their high costs. Some stakeholders just consider the IT cost before the decision of implementing them. Hence, the absence of a complete evaluation leads the company to implement these technologies without any analysis. However, this evaluation is not simple and fast because it requires a structure supported by some attributes. In this context, the article aims to evaluate RFID in two hospitals, focusing on major operations, by a set of attributes. For this purpose, there was a literature review with an initial survey of articles in the main database. Then, there was the literature review, the structuring of the questionnaire, semi-structured interviews with two case studies, ending with a counterpoint between theory and field findings. After the case studies, the authors noticed that RFID increased profitability and inventory accuracy. On the other hand, there are factors to improve in the studied sample, such as system complexity, lack of technology knowledge, interference, return on investment, deployment cost, and employee training.