ICICTT, 2013 Integration of RFID Technology with Time Oriented Database System for Managing Patients in Hospitals Nadeem Mahmood, Kamran Ahsan, Zain Abbas, Kashif Rizwan Department of Computer Science (UBIT) Univesity of Karachi, Karachi Pakistan Abstract—The focus on patient safety, care and security in hospitals has yielded a number of new technologies aimed at improving quality of patient care. Health information systems are now combining physical process of healthcare delivery with med- ication information and applications that provide clinical decision support. One such technology is Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). Application of RFID technology in hospitals has risen dramatically during the last decade. This study focuses the use of RFID technology for managing patients and ensures better control and safety procedures. The paper presents a system that integrates RFID with patient data management system addressing all these drawbacks together with the classical entities in a health information system or patient data management. Keywords—Patient Data Management, RFID, Healthcare, Temporal database, health databases, e-Health I. I NTRODUCTION The evolution in the Communication Technologies during the last few years imposed a profound impact on all walks of life including education, engineering, management, finance, and medical science. The healthcare organizations are facing a variety of new challenges such as improvement in quality of healthcare provided increasing financial pressure, dearth of technical human resource, and introduction of patient safety and security measures [1]. Radio frequency identification (RFID) is one of the proven technologies to resolve these kinds of problem [2]. With the help of RFID, the status of the patients as well as, services provided to them, can effectively be monitored [3]. It can be integrated with the current databases and in real time. Staff can be monitored when they interact with the patient for e.g. giving medications on time, monitoring patients diet, treatment etc. [4]. The real-time visibility of patients within and between departments and the availability of rooms and beds can be easily determined through tracking boards. Patient is a key entity in any health database because majority of the data spins around the patient such as condition, treatment, follow-up, medication, and hospitalization [5]. The concept of time is also very important here because patients data alter with respect to time and temporal aspect of data must be stored in the database environment [6][7]. This paper examines RFID based solution for the challenges discussed above. II. RADIO FREQUENCY I DENTIFICATION TECHNOLOGY The term RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) describes a wireless identification technology that communicates data by radio waves [2]. The identification information is encoded in a chip and packaged in a tag connected to an antenna which transmits this code. RFID labels can hold more data than Fig. 1: Components of RFID systems [8] barcodes, and can be read automatically by the reader without any user intervention. The technology works through this communication between the RFID tags and RFID readers [8]. The usage of RFID technology continues to increase due to better service and proven efficiency for all the stakeholders. Fig 1 shows basic components of RFID system. It can help hospitals to locate critical equipment more quickly for improving standard of patient care, pharmaceutical compa- nies to reduce counterfeiting of medical products and logistics providers to improve the management of moveable assets. With the ability to store several kilobytes of data in addition to the unique identifier, it could be viewed as a massive distributed database that has the potential to become ubiquitous i.e. billions of tags used throughout the world on a variety of objects that are sold, purchased, stored, moved and even produced [4]. III. RFID AND HEALTHCARE I NDUSTRY RFID technology is extremely useful in location of institutional assets. Integration of RFID based information into existing healthcare management applications will optimize the work- flow processes used in healthcare delivery [10]. Fig 2 shows the use of RFID in a healthcare system. When a patient enters the healthcare facility for example, RFID tag is allocated and all information is maintained in a centralized database. All the services provided to the patient are tracked by creating an association with staff, equipment, doctors, lab, pharmacy and supplies. 978-969-9825-9/13/$30 c ICICTT2013