[LINK] RFID and Intelligence - the Fturue

Geoffrey Ramadan gramadan at umd.com.au
Sat May 19 00:35:45 AEST 2007


Adam Todd wrote:
> At 09:05 PM 18/05/2007, Geoff Ramadan wrote:
>> Eleanor Lister wrote:
>> <snip)
>>> so what is the right question?
>> </snip>
>>
>> Eleanor
>>
>> Let me paint a picture for you.
>>
>> All medical instruments (eg. scappels, tweezers etc) and devices will 
>> have an embedded RFID tag.
>
> Is that so when the Surgeons leave tools inside you, as you walk (or 
> get wheeled) out the door, the buzzers will go off!
Actually this is one reason, but there are many others.
1) to ensure that sterilization has taken place. Many sterilizers 
provide reports, which can now can be directly associated with the 
medical instrument.
2) some diseases like "mad cow disease" may no be diagnosed for months. 
Normal sterilisation processes do not kill these. Hence you have to 
recall and destroy all instruments that were used on that operations, 
plus identify who else was operated on by those same instruments. This 
happened to one Melbourne hospital which had to recall instruments, but 
could not identify which ones.... so all had to be destroyed costing 
millions.
3) in operations, kits of medical instruments are made up, many are 
incorrectly packed. RFID will be used to ensure the kit is correct.

Geoffrey Ramadan B.E.(Elec)
Chairman, Automatic Data Capture Association (www.adca.com.au)
and
Managing Director, Unique Micro Design (www.umd.com.au)



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