Barriers and Critical Success Factors in Adoption of RFID in Healthcare Sector : Case Studies of Iranian Hospitals

This thesis explores the barriers and critical success factors of RFID adoption in Iranian healthcare industry context as one of developing countries. RFID is a contactless technology which benefits from radio frequency signals to send and receive data. In these days hospitals need to enhance the safety and quality of healthcare if they want to remain in the competition with other hospitals. It has been proved that RFID system in healthcare has the potential to increase patient safety, decrease the operational cost, and enhances the tracking of items and human, and real time management of hospital equipments. Although such technology has been adopted and implemented in countries such as USA and European countries, rate of adoption of developing countries is still very low as compared to developed countries, despite great potential of system to solve current problems of healthcare. The purpose of this research is a better understanding and identifying of barriers and critical success factors, which are affecting the adoption of RFID technology in the healthcare sector in developing countries such as Iran from the perspective of healthcare decision makers, managers and IT professionals. Case study research with qualitative approach has been chosen for this study. Research question have been developed to fulfill the purpose of study. Based on literature review , a frame of reference have been made to aid answering research question and for data collection purpose. Result of study shows that the barriers which developing countries such as Iran are dealing with are mostly organizational and environmental barriers. Similar to the barriers, critical success factors are also mostly related to organizational and environmental domains. The findings of this study suggest that the stage of RFID adoption in Iranian context still in infancy stage. Most respondents believe that the common barriers to adoption of RFID are (1) Cost of RFID system,(2) difficulty and lack of ROI calculation, (3)lack of RFID knowledge of hospitals,(4) resistance of staff, (5) lack of vendors support,(6) wireless infrastructure/connectivity problems. Identified critical success factors are (1) business and dataflow analysis (2) management support (3) identification of performance gap and process shortcoming for the purpose of enhance and supporting the work process, (4) vendor support,(5) governmental support (6) compatibility with hospital existing system.Validerat; 20110622 (anonymous