“Smart Bands act as a catalyst, enabling patient information to be stored and transferred to and from RFID readers, information systems, and medical devices.”

Hal Halim, International Business Manager for PDC, speaks highly of his company’s Smart Band RFID Wristbands and HP RFID PDA readers – recently implemented (as of Friday) at Taiwan’s Chang-Gung Memorial Hospital.

The RFID chip on the wristband contains pertinent patient information, including the patient’s name, medical record number, sex, age, and doctor’s name.

Precision Dynamics Corporation and HP Provide Chang Gung Memorial Hospital with RFID System for Patient Management

[01/05/07] Precision Dynamics Corporation (PDC) and HP announced the successful implementation of an RFID (radio frequency identification) patient management system at Chang-Gung Memorial Hospital (CGMH), part of an 8,800-bed health system in Taiwan.

CGMH implemented the RFID system in its operating rooms to improve patient safety by verifying and positively identifying patients, gathering real-time data, reducing risk of wrong-site and/or wrong-patient surgery, and ensuring compliance with hospital patient safety procedures or standard operating procedures. Since the implementation, CGMH has achieved 100% accuracy in patient ID in the OR.

The new RFID system automates many manual functions of the previous operating room processes. The system helps verify that the five rights of medication safety are met-right patient, medication, dose, time, and route-as well as right surgery and surgical site.

Automating patient data verification processes has saved CGMH medical staff an average of 4.3 minutes per patient. Also, automated data collection has helped prevent common manual data entry mistakes, which if gone undetected could lead to medical errors.

According to Joseph Ho, chief information officer at CGMH, the reduction of errors related to oral confirmation and manual entries of patient, medication and specimen ID data, as well as standard operating procedure compliance and real-time exception alerts, are major advantages of the system implementation. “We have not had any patient identification errors since implementing the new RFID system-a significant accomplishment,” said Ho.

PDC Smart Band RFID Wristbands and HP RFID PDA readers, handheld readers, and printers make up the system’s hardware framework, complemented by HP’s technology consulting, process design, system development and deployment.

“Smart Bands act as a catalyst, enabling patient information to be stored and transferred to and from RFID readers, information systems, and medical devices,” said Hal Halim, International Business Manager, PDC. “The RFID chip on the wristband contains pertinent patient information, including the patient’s name, medical record number, sex, age, and doctor’s name.”

Storing confidential patient information on the RFID chip rather than printing the information on the wristband provides increased patient privacy. The system’s real-time reporting instantly alerts medical staff of the patient’s status. In addition, sequential procedures, including time-stamps, help guarantee standard operating procedure compliance.

“HP works with customers adopting RFID technology to determine the breakthroughs that can be achieved in their business processes,” said Dr. Beng Teck Liang, general manager, public sector – Asia Pacific and Japan, HP. “Partnering with PDC, we were able to ensure the RFID system improved patient management and streamlined hospital procedures at CGMH.”

About HP

HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company’s offerings span IT infrastructure, global services, business and home computing, and imaging and printing. For the four fiscal quarters ended Oct. 31, 2006, HP revenue totaled $91.7 billion. More information about HP is available at http://www.hp.com.

About Precision Dynamics

With 50 years of experience, PDC is a global leader and pacesetter in the development of Auto ID wristband systems for healthcare, patron management, and law enforcement. The company introduced the first patient Bar Code ID Wristband, patented Smart Band RFID Wristbands, the AgeBand Electronic Age/ID Verification System, and PDC Smart Kiosk Cashless RFID System. PDC is committed to 100% quality in service, design, and manufacturing and has ISO-9001: 2000 and ISO-13485: 2003 certification. For more information, visit www.pdcorp.com.