Benefits Of RFID In The Healthcare Industry

Healthcare touches everyone's lives, dealing literally with life and death issues. However, it is also a large industry, which is facing major challenges worldwide. Not least of these is cost. For example, the average healthcare spending across European Union countries is almost 9% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). And with public expectation of the medical profession increasing and the world's population aging, the healthcare industry urgently needs solutions that address these rising costs.

What's more, despite increasingly large investment and the best efforts of healthcare professionals, mistakes still happen. In the United States alone, 98,000 people each year die because of medical errors, a figure higher than the country's death toll from road accidents, breast cancer or HIV/AIDS. Meanwhile, errors cost the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS) some £500 million (USD 875 million) annually. We see huge opportunities for technology to improve people's lives. We believe that applying RFID and contactless technologies to the healthcare sector has huge potential to improve patient care and save lives. Not only can these technologies reduce dangerous and expensive mistakes, they can dramatically improve efficiency in numerous areas, including that of automation within pharmaceutical the supply chain.

The proper implementation of RFID can dramatically help healthcare professionals focus more time on patients, and will free up more money for patient care and research rather than administration.