Using Survey Data to Design a RFID Centric Service System for Hospitals

The continuous growth of health care services expenses urges U.S. government to take actions. The adoption of Information Technology, and especially RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) allow hospitals to re-engineer their processes in order to reduce costs, maintaining the same level of service to the patients. Information technology represents a core element of the service itself; therefore a service design approach is believed to improve the adoption rate of RFID in hospitals. The main goal of the present study is to propose an RFID based service platform for hospitals, which is consistent with a service science driven design approach. A survey of 33 California based hospitals has been used to identify the user requirements of the hospitals. Later, a business process re-engineering for hospitals is proposed. Firstly the different actors involved in the health care services, along with their relationships in terms of information flows, are identified. This leads us to identify the various operations in a hospital setting that have a potential to be streamlined by introducing RFID technology. Having introduced these operations, we theorize a customizable RFID service, which can be implemented sequentially by each hospital according to its individual conditions such that it suits them most. [<i>Service Science</i>, ISSN 2164-3962 (print), ISSN 2164-3970 (online), was published by Services Science Global (SSG) from 2009 to 2011 as issues under ISBN 978-1-4276-2090-3.]