Framework, strategy and evaluation of health care processes with RFID

The working environment in health care organizations is characterized by its demand for highly dynamic process and labor management in which (a) medical personnel are generally associated with several disparate types of tasks, (b) service location and service personnel change frequently, (c) highly uncertain environment where emergency issues could arise at any time, and (d) the stakes are high since invaluable human lives are involved. There is an urgent need from both researchers and health care organizations to develop reasonable management strategies for maintaining a good balance between efficient management and superior medical service quality. We discuss the potential for real-time health care coordination and effective medical process and labor management enabled by RFID item-level tracking/tracing identification technology. We explore the uniqueness of instance-level process mining and its application in health care environment. We then propose an adaptive learning framework that supports real-time health care coordination and analyze its benefits compared to traditional routine process and labor management. We find that while RFID-enabled real-time medical process and labor management provides marginal improvement for premium medical service providers, it generates appreciable improvement both in terms of efficiency and service quality for public health care institutions where availability of necessary resources such as medical staff and equipment are highly constrained.