An Integrated Conceptual Framework for RFID Enabled Healthcare

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is a wireless communication technology that facilitates automatic identification and data capture without human intervention. Since 2000s, RFID applications in the health care industry are increasing. RFID has brought many improvements in areas like patient care, patient safety, equipment tracking, resource utilization, processing time reduction and so on. On the other hand, often deployment of RFID is questioned on the issues like high capital investment, technological complexity, and privacy concerns. Exploration of existing literature indicates the presence of works on the topics like asset management, patient management, staff management, institutional advantages, and organizational issues. However, most of the works are focused on a particular issue. Still now, scholarly attempts to integrate all the facades of RFID-enabled healthcare are limited. In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework that represents the scope for implementation of this technology and the various dimensions of RFID-enabled healthcare and demonstrate them in detail. Also, we have discussed the critical issues that can prove to be potential barriers to its successful implementation and current approaches to resolving these. We also discuss some of the regulatory initiatives encouraging its adoption in the healthcare industry. Also, we have highlighted the future research opportunities in this domain