A new study shows hospitals are aggressively deploying a range of active and some passive radio-frequency identification systems.

The payback no longer is simply being able to find medical equipment including wheelchairs. Increasingly, wireless identification and location data is being used to streamline and repair a range of healthcare workflows and business processes.

The study, "Trends in RFID 2008," is based on 100 telephone interviews earlier this year with IT professionals and clinical and nursing directors at hospitals with typically 300 or more beds. It was carried out by Greg Malkary, founder and managing director of Spyglass Consulting Group, a market-intelligence and research firm in California.

Click to see: Healthcare organizations investing in RFID

A previous Spyglass study was done in 2005. Since then, the number of RFID-based applications has tripled, Malkary found. "A few years ago, they were trialing [RFID] technology, with a few hundred objects being tracked," he says. Now there are large-scale product deployments rolling out, tracking thousands of objects in multiple locations.

Harrisburg Hospital in Pennsylvania deployed a patient-tracking system from PeriOptimum for surgical patients, then expanded the 433MHz wireless infrastructure from Lawrence, Mass.-based Radianse to track wheelchairs and a wide range of portable medical gear. By the end of 2008, the hospital plans to have nearly 10,000 wireless tags deployed. As at Harrisburg, many of these applications are "active RFID" -- with a radio embedded in a tag that's able to transmit a signal on its own. These products use a variety of frequency bands, and in some cases are Wi-Fi based. Passive RFID tags lack a radio: When they come near a tag reader, the reader's radio activates the tag, which reflects some of the signal's energy back to the reader, carrying with it the tag's unique ID number.

Early applications, such as infant-tracking systems, are giving way to staff tracking, combined with time-motion studies to optimize workflows in such areas as radiology and surgical departments. "You can see where people are and figure out how they're spending their time," Malkary says. The 2008 interviewees linked RFID data to quality-improvement programs, such as Six Sigma.

One notable technology shift is healthcare's willingness to embrace multiple wireless technologies. The 2005 Spyglass study found that 90% of respondents were unwilling to invest in wireless that didn't use their existing wireless LAN (WLAN) or corporate backbones. "Today they are much more open to multiple technology investments to get increased levels of [location] accuracy," Malkary says.