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June 27, 2008

3M Track and Trace Solutions Use RFID to Manage Medical Records at Fort Hood

By Mani Soundararajan, TMCnet Contributing Editor

3M (News - Alert) has completed the development and installation of a RFID (radio frequency identification) Smart Shelf System to track and manage the more than 150,000 medical files of U.S. Army personnel and their family members at Fort Hood, Texas.



 
Under the terms of a three-year, $3.76-million contract, 3M Track and Trace Solutions will provide training and maintenance services. Fort Hood, occupying 340 square miles and situated about 60 miles north of Austin, is the nation’s largest active-duty domestic armed forces facility.

RFID technology uses a microchip and tiny antenna implanted in a tag (News - Alert), which is attached to an object, in much the same way as a barcode. A major difference, however, is that a RFID tag transmits its information to a tracking device using radio waves, thereby making it a cost effective, accurate and easy to use tracking system.

The custom-designed 3M RFID Smart Shelf System is intended to substantially reduce errors and inefficiencies associated with manual tracking, retrieval, filing and file merging methods of medical records management at Fort Hood, where thousands of files may be in use at the base’s six clinics during any given month. This solution is expected make a positive impact on operational efficiencies in health care delivery, the troop deployment process, and the management of medical data collection.

One of the top priorities of the system is to provide virtually instant accessibility to complete medical records for soldiers and their family members requiring intensive and complex healthcare services.

“The cost-efficiency and far-reaching versatility of RFID is prompting an expanding range of innovative applications in almost all facets of society,” observes Lem Amen, vice president of 3M Track and Trace Solutions. “As a leader in this emerging technology, 3M is very proud to help introduce this powerful tool to the Army.”

The program to track and manage Army medical records utilizing radio frequency identification technology is being led by the Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC), a unit of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (USAMRMC).

The Army becomes the first branch of the U.S. Armed Forces to deploy this RFID system from 3M for medical records management. Three other federal government entities are using RFID systems from 3M Track and Trace Solutions for applications not requiring Smart Shelf technology.

David Erickson (News - Alert), 3M program manager for the Fort Hood project, said approximately 300 cabinets have been installed with “smart shelves” to accommodate the more than 150,000 medical files, whose movements are continuously monitored.

“The system is designed to provide automatic inventory monitoring and automatic error notification, and thereby essentially eliminate human compliance issues,” he says. “The problems that arise in manually managing vast numbers of medical records are not only a waste of time and money, but, more important, they can adversely affect the delivery of medical services. And on a major military installation, they can also have an impact on the timely deployment of personnel to their assignments to other parts of the world.”

Erickson says 3M’s Fort Hood contract covered the tasks of choosing and optimizing the best radio frequency technology for this application, developing a cost-effective system that includes shelf-based reading capabilities and specialized software tailored specifically to meet the military’s processes, and the installation and training of personnel for its use and maintenance. 3M has chosen the Infinity 510 UHF tag readers from Sirit (News - Alert) for the Fort Hood RFID installation.

“This application presented a number of environmental, technological and performance challenges, and 3M has implemented several unique concepts to achieve remarkable results,” says Tony Sabetti (News - Alert), vice president of RF Solutions at Sirit. “We are pleased that the IN 510, which was selected as the top performing reader in the ODIN technologies Reader Benchmark report, provides the reader management flexibility, read accuracy, and high tag read rates needed to meet the stringent requirements for the application.”

While one may wonder why the U.S. military did not choose to digitize the medical records and have computers deployed across the facility to access the records, the challenges involved in developing a fully customized software solution probably make the RFID solution easier and quicker to implement – even if it is a stop gap arrangement.
 
Mani Soundararajan is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Mani’s articles, please visit his columnist page.
 
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