Technology in healthcare : business process reengineering and RFID at Hospital Beatriz Ângelo

• Autor(a) principal: Caldas, Tânia Patrícia Vieira
• Data de Publicação: 2012
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/11872
• topic: Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

The purpose of this dissertation is to analyse if Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) can be used to improve the patient’s food chain at Hospital Beatriz Ângelo. Under the theory of Business Process Reengineering, the patient’s food chain and related activities are monitored and documented. As a result, the main problems and wasteful activities are identified, being some examples of it, lack of internal auditing to the number of meals served, and the time consumed when printing and checking diet lists and adding extra information to diet labels by hand. For every problem and wasteful activity identified, a solution is proposed and both technical and social designs are described. Gains derived from it are also evaluated. From these solutions it is possible to conclude that RFID can effectively be implemented as an internal auditing tool, to control the number of meals served to hospitalized patients, avoiding over-billing and eliminating the non-accurate and time consuming activity of manual billing. This is ultimately translated into cost savings by the hospital. Also, other technology is considered as a solution, a Zebra printer. This material is expected to eliminate the wasteful activities mentioned above, allowing staff to focus on more productive tasks. This dissertation concludes that RFID technology can effectively be applied at Hospital Beatriz Ângelo to improve a primary process, the patient´s food chain.