IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2015 - 46

any clinics and health care facilities in rural and slum areas
in India and elsewhere have
limited or no patient records,
and in some cases not even
paper-based systems. This
makes continued patient care
challenging, with no history of previous conditions
or medications.
The RFID Individual Tracking and Records Management (RFID-ITRM) system solution delivers patient
records and medical histories along with RFID card
identification in areas where establishing patient information is particularly difficult. Individuals' data is stored
on a secure central database accessed locally and
remotely by authorized mobile computing devices. Uses

Many clinics and health care facilities
in rural and slum areas in India have
limited or no patient records - in
some cases they do not even have
paper-based systems.

for this solution ranges from dealing with the aftermath
of disasters, to addressing the basic lack of services in
underserved communities. The system includes provisions for data collection, analytics, and dissemination.
RFID-ITRM was deployed in December 2011 within a
slum community managed by Manav Sadhna, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) operating from the Gandhi Ashram in Ahmedabad, India (see Figs. 1 and 2). The
system is used within a clinic operating six days a week,
and by health workers touring the community.
The solution's concept was reported earlier [1]. This
article describes the deployment of the system and
provides information about environment requirements,
technology integration, and sustainability issues.

Value Chain
Examining an associated value chain helps reveal the
dynamics of an ecosystem [2]. In this case, the key
stakeholders in the value chain are the:
■ administrator and physicians at the central medical
facility,
■ pool of affiliated community healthcare workers,
■ patients and the inhabitants in the immediate communities,

equipment and e-health recorder solution providers, and
wide-area communication providers.
These stakeholders will have to be able to extract value
from the system for the scheme to be self-sustainable.
The patients are the end customers. In this case
they are generally low-income and low-literacy families
or individuals in underserved communities. Such communities exist in remote rural areas and in slums within
cities. The solution is designed for both with current
deployment emphasis on slum communities.
The RFID-ITRM system provides the following benefits:
■ For patients, better healthcare at an equivalent
or lower cost than previously available. Once
introduced, the system effectively creates a better standard of living.
■ For the community healthcare workers, job opportunities facilitated by technology use, creating new
income streams.
■ For the central medical facility, an increase in operational efficiency with the potential of growing the
addressable patient base.
■ As a byproduct, business opportunities to suppliers
and other affiliated service providers.
■
■

System Configuration
The solution provides an individual records management system, backed with RFID tracking cards and
mobile devices for field outreach. Keeping patient histories allows better and safer services. Special needs
are tracked and errors are reduced. Mobile devices with
access to patient histories allow community outreach.
The basic system configuration including these features
is abstracted and shown in Fig. 3.
The RFID-ITRM solution is used to register and monitor transactions between community healthcare workers and patients in the field, as well as to enable the
healthcare worker to upload and download selected/
increment a l medica l record infor mation from
the database located at the central medical facility
(see Fig. 4).
The mobile RFID read device is password or biometrically protected so that if the device is stolen or lost, it
cannot be used by third parties to perform unauthorized reading or retrieval of medical information from the
central electronic medical record database.
The system is not intended to support mission-critical medical cases due to the fact that the underlying
wide-area communication infrastructure may not be sufficiently robust at remote locations at all times.

Clinic Operation in the Slums
The system provides for patient care procedures at all
stages of 1) patient registration, 2) visit registration,
3) consultation, and 4) follow-up and administration.

IEEE TEchnology and SocIETy MagazInE

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MARCH 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2015