Guest editorial for the special issue on RFID-enabled healthcare: applications, issues and benefits

Information technology (IT)-enabled healthcare is an area of interest for scholars from various fields of research (Fichman et al. 2011). Lately, radio frequency identification (RFID) technology emerged as a new multidimensional IT innovation (Fosso Wamba 2011) with a tremendous research potential in the healthcare sector. However, the current level of articles published on RFID-enabled healthcare is still fairly low. For example, a review of articles on RFID technology by (Ngai et al. 2008) showed that only 3.6% of articles were concerned with applications, issues and benefits related to the healthcare sector. The main objective of this special issue was to attempt to bridge this knowledge gap, by seeking recent articles dealing with applications, issues and benefits related to RFID-enabled healthcare. All articles submitted to the special issue went through three rounds of double-blind review process, with a minimum of four reviewers per article. The review of the introductory article was handled by the journal’s editor-in-chief to avoid any conflict of interest.