A Laboratory Specimen Management System with Commercially Viable RFID Solution

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) uses wireless electronic signal to identify, communicate and track tags attached to objects, animals or human. Applications using RFID technology have been successfully deployed in a variety of industries for many years. Discussions of adopting RFID in healthcare, its potential benefits and major obstacles have been well published in literatures. As healthcare industry increase its effort to improve quality and reduce errors, RFID is an important element in the healthcare information technology (IT) that is helping the industry to reach its goals. However, few has been able to successfully integrate RFID technology in real clinical environment due to reasons such as high cost and availability of suitable products. This study presents a commercially viable RFID solution for anatomical laboratory specimen management systems which has been used in partnering pathology laboratory and urology clinics for over a year. Over five thousand RFID tags has been embedded with prostate biopsy cores for over two thousand subjects with high reliability rate and overwhelmingly positive results.