S. L. Ting

Critical Elements and Lessons Learnt from the Implementation of an RFID-enabled Healthcare Management System in a Medical Organization

Healthcare services are complex and life-critical. One mistake in any procedure may lead to irremediable consequences; numerous researchers, thus, introduce information and communication technology to improve quality of services and enhance patient safety by reducing the medical errors. Radio frequency identification (RFID) is considered as one of the emerging tool assist in meeting the challenges of the present situation. In recent years, RFID has been applied in medical organizations for the purpose of managing and tracking medical equipment, monitoring and identifying patients, ensuring that the right medication is given to the right patient, and preventing the use of counterfeit medicine. However, most of the existing literature focuses on demonstrating how RFID can benefit the healthcare industry, whereas little attention has been given to the management issues involved in constructing an RFID project in medical organizations. In this paper, an exploratory case study is conducted in a medical organization to illustrate the development framework and critical issues that should be taken into consideration in the preparation, implementation and maintenance stage of constructing such a project. All the experiences and results discussed in this paper offer valuable and useful insights to steer those who would like to start their journey using RFID in medical organizations.

The Study on Using Passive RFID Tags for Indoor Positioning

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is the technology that put an RFID tag on objects or people, so that they can be identified, tracked, and managed automatically. With its wide application in the automobile assembly industry, warehouse management and the supply chain network, RFID has been recognized as the next promising technology in serving the positioning purpose. Existing positioning technologies such as GPS are not available indoors as the terminal cannot get the signal from satellites. To enhance the availability of the positioning systems for indoors, the development of RFID positioning system for locating objects or people have became a hot topic in recent research. Compared with conventional active and high-cost solutions, this paper studied the feasibility of using passive RFID tags for indoor positioning and object location detection to provide real time information for tracking movement. Results of experiment show that readability of the passive RFID positioning system is satisfactory, and it is a more cost effective solution when compared with other positioning technologies.

A counterfeit network analyzer based on RFID and EPC

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to focus on the design of a counterfeit network analyzer (CNA) for aggregating all the problematic product flows in order to discover any counterfeit distribution source, and to control the spread of counterfeit goods. The analyzer leverages radio frequency identification (RFID) information stored within the electronic product code (EPC) network.Design/methodology/approach – The system architecture of the proposed CNA is first discussed. A case study of the system application in a Hong Kong pharmaceutical manufacturing company then presents the adoption process and the challenges encountered in such technologies.Findings – Compared with traditional approaches, the results show that the proposed RFID solution is reliable and is capable of discovering counterfeit distributions, as well as reducing the detection costs by means of higher product movement visibility within the supply chain.Practical implications – A prototype system has been constructed and trial implemen...

RACER: Rule-Associated CasE-based Reasoning for supporting General Practitioners in prescription making

Prescription is an important element in the medical practice. An appropriate drug therapy is complex in which the decision of prescribing is influenced by many factors. Any discrepancy in the prescription making process can lead to serious consequences. In particular, the General Practitioners (GPs), who need to diagnose and treat a wide range of health conditions and diseases, must be knowledgeable enough in deciding what type of medicines should be given to the patients. With the widespread computerization of medical records, GPs now can make use of accumulated historic clinical data in retrieving similar decisions in therapeutic treatment for treating the new situation. However, the applications of decision support tools are rarely found in the prescription domain due to the complex nature of the domain and limitations of the existing tools. It was argued that existing tools can only solve a small amount of the cases on the real world dataset. This paper proposes a new revised Case-based Reasoning (CBR) mechanism, named Rule-Associated CasE-based Reasoning (RACER), which integrates CBR and association rules mining for supporting GPs prescription. It aims at leveraging the two most common techniques in the field and dealing with the complex multiple values solution. Eight hundred real cases from a medical organization are collected and used for evaluating the performance of RACER. The proposed method was also compared with CBR and association rules mining for testing. The results demonstrate that the combination leads to increased in both recall and precision in various settings of parameters. The performance of RACER remains stable by using different sets of parameters, which shows that the most important element of the mechanism is self-determined.

Data Mining in Biomedicine: Current Applications and Further Directions for Research

Data mining is the process of finding the patterns, associations or relationships among data using different analytical techniques involving the creation of a model and the concluded result will become useful information or knowledge. The advancement of the new medical deceives and the database management systems create a huge number of data-bases in the biomedicine world. Establishing a methodology for knowledge discovery and management of the large amounts of heterogeneous data has become a major priority of research. This paper introduces some basic data mining techniques, unsupervised learning and supervising learning, and reviews the application of data mining in biomedicine. Applications of the multimedia mining, including text, image, video and web mining are discussed. The key issues faced by the computing professional, medical doctors and clinicians are highlighted. We also state some foreseeable future developments in the field. Although extracting useful information from raw biomedical data is a challenging task, data mining is still a good area of scientific study and remains a promising and rich field for research.

CASESIAN: A knowledge-based system using statistical and experiential perspectives for improving the knowledge sharing in the medical prescription process

Knowledge sharing is crucial for better patient care in the healthcare industry, but it is challenging for physicians to exchange their clinical insights and practice experiences, particularly with regard to the issuing of prescriptions for medicine. The aim of our study is to facilitate knowledge sharing and information exchange in this area by means of a knowledge-based system. We propose a knowledge-based system, CASESIAN, to automatically model each physicians prescription experience. This is done by collecting as many as possible instances of when the physician has issued a prescription. These occasions will be analyzed from a statistical perspective to form a reciprocal interactive knowledge sharing process for the issuing of medical prescriptions which we will call the prescription process. With the help of the prescription data in medical organizations, the knowledge-based system employs the Bayesian Theorem to correlate the experience of peers in order to evaluate individual prescription knowledge as retrieved through the case-based reasoning technique. In addition, a system prototype was implemented in a Hong Kong medical organization to evaluate the feasibility of such an approach. Our evaluation indicates that there is a significant improvement in knowledge sharing after the adoption of the system. CASESIAN obtains a higher rating in both recall and precision measurement when compared to traditional knowledge-based system. In particular, its information retrieval is much stronger than the baseline in around 40%. Furthermore, regarding the result of the interviews, physicians agree that the system can improve the storing and sharing of medical prescription knowledge.

Web Information Retrieval for Health Professionals

This paper presents a Web Information Retrieval System (WebIRS), which is designed to assist the healthcare professionals to obtain up-to-date medical knowledge and information via the World Wide Web (WWW). The system leverages the document classification and text summarization techniques to deliver the highly correlated medical information to the physicians. The system architecture of the proposed WebIRS is first discussed, and then a case study on an application of the proposed system in a Hong Kong medical organization is presented to illustrate the adoption process and a questionnaire is administrated to collect feedback on the operation and performance of WebIRS in comparison with conventional information retrieval in the WWW. A prototype system has been constructed and implemented on a trial basis in a medical organization. It has proven to be of benefit to healthcare professionals through its automatic functions in classification and summarizing the medical information that the physicians needed and interested. The results of the case study show that with the use of the proposed WebIRS, significant reduction of searching time and effort, with retrieval of highly relevant materials can be attained.

A two-factor authentication system using Radio Frequency Identification and watermarking technology

Counterfeiting has been growing at an alarming rate worldwide. The increasing number of counterfeit products has penetrated into various industries, especially the luxury goods industry. Numerous anti-counterfeit and product authentication technologies are available to combat this problem. At present, the verification principle in product authentication mainly relies on optical detection and security feature identification which require human experts or machines to determine the products genuineness. As a result, the current approach to product authentication presents formidable challenges to customers in determining the products authenticity. Attempted to address the challenges, this paper proposes a Watermark-RFID based Self-validation System (WARDS) that provides a self-validation and two-factor authentication approach through integration of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and watermark technology by means of a mobile platform. The system architecture and a framework for development of WARDS are presented. Critical issues at different stages of constructing WARDS in organizations are identified. Furthermore, the capability, benefits and advantages of using the proposed system in combating counterfeiting problems are illustrated in the findings of a trial implementation presented in this paper.

Experiences Sharing of Implementing Template-Based Electronic Medical Record System (TEMRS) in a Hong Kong Medical Organization

This paper aims to investigate the efficacy and feasibility of Template-based Electronic Medical Record System (TEMRS) and factors for its successful implementation. A TEMRS was designed and implemented in one core clinic of a Hong Kong professional multi-disciplinary medical services provider with four core clinics located in different parts of Hong Kong. Eight doctors participated in the study. Surveys and interviews were conducted to acquire the users’ feedback and satisfaction level. The design, development, and the factors related to the success of the implementation of TEMRS were analyzed. In the study period, 3,032 cases were collected. The most encountered diagnosis were upper respiratory tract infection (50.59%), gastroenteritis (10.19%), dermatitis (5.87%), dyspepsia (5.28%) and rhinitis (4.82%). The system gained an overall satisfaction by the users and the most satisfied areas were rapid retrieving the necessary information of patient (75%) and fasten the diagnostic selection (75%). TEMRS is an enabling system which can reduce the user resistance in new technology with its flexibility. The consideration of cost, security, human, technical, data migration and standardization issues are essential in the implementation of the TEMRS and further research should be conducted to expand the TEMRS’s implementation in health care system.

A methodological approach to optimizing RFID deployment

The interest of adopting RFID continues to grow in many industries, ranging from supply chain automation to healthcare management. However, dynamics of the operating environment is one of the major challenges that impede RFID deployment. Even though numerous researchers focus on controlled laboratory experiments to enhance the success of deployment, it is found that system performance in the actual production environment may differ significantly from that conducted in a controlled laboratory, resulting in poor deployment result. To cope with this situation, this paper proposes an RFID Deployment Optimizer (RFIDDO), which is a generic methodology for optimizing the RFID configuration to provide objective, quantifiable data about the data capture performance of RFID readers for comparing and optimizing RFID applications in a scientific manner. A case study has also been conducted in a logistics company to demonstrate the implementation of RFIDDO and provide contextual details to help other firms in coping with the environmental dynamics in the journey of RFID deployment.