A Survey About Real-Time Location Systems in Healthcare Environments

• Published in: Journal of medical systems Vol. 45; no. 3; p. 35
• Main Authors: Bazo, Rodrigo, da Costa, Cristiano André, Seewald, Lucas Adams, da Silveira, Luiz Gonzaga, Antunes, Rodolfo Stoffel, Righi, Rodrigo da Rosa, Rodrigues, Vinicius Facco
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01-03-2021; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Accuracy; Counterfeit; Counterfeiting; Electronic health records; Global positioning systems; GPS; Health care; Health Informatics; Health Sciences; Hospitals; Keywords; Literature reviews; Medical errors; Medical research; Medicine; Medicine & Public Health; Mobile & Wireless Health; Polls & surveys; Real time; Statistics for Life Sciences; Taxonomy; Workflow; Healthcare; Taxonomy; Real-time location systems; RTLS
• ISSN: 0148-5598; 1573-689X
• DOI: 10.1007/s10916-021-01710-1

Every year healthcare organizations suffer from several issues, such as unapropriated workflow, thousands of deaths caused by medical errors, counterfeit drugs, and increasing costs. To offer better patient care and increase profit, hospitals could adopt solutions that help remedy these problems. Real-Time Location Systems have the potential to deal with many of these issues, as well as offering means for developing new and intelligent solutions. This kind of system enables tracking assets and people, allowing several improvements. Even though the benefits of such solutions are well known and desired by healthcare providers, their large scale adoption is still distant. In this article, we surveyed Real-Time Location Systems usage in hospitals. While developing this survey, we observed a need for organizing important aspects of healthcare-oriented Real-Time Location Systems. Therefore, we analyzed challenges regarding this topic and a taxonomy proposed. This survey offers researchers and developers ways to comprehend the challenges surrounding this area while proposing a classification of aspects that a Real-Time Location System for healthcare environments must assess for it to be successful.