NFC tag-based mHealth patient healthcare tracking system

Patient misdiagnosis is quite a common occurrence in hospitals around the world. It is a mistake that can happen to anyone at any time, and especially during a pandemic crisis when hospital facilities are overwhelmed with increasing number of patients. This problem could stem from improper patient identification whereby patient files are mislabelled or placed in an incorrect patient dossier. It is the responsibility of a hospital and its employees to guarantee that such mistakes do not occur. With respect to this, near-field communication (NFC) technology, which is a short ranged wireless communication technology, has been identified to have great potential to help identify patients in hospitals. This paper demonstrates a solution by designing and developing a patient healthcare management information system that sees the seamless integration of the NFC technology along with and both web and mobile technologies, to provide a holistic solution to tackle the problem of patient misidentification in a hospital environment especially during pandemics such as COVID-19.The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) was used as evaluation method in order to quantify the proposed systems’s usability and acceptance using 5 constructs. Results showed acceptance of the system with a mean score of 4, indicating that the NFC tag-based mHealth Patient Healthcare Tracking System was found to be useful and easy to use