IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Spring 2013 - 38

Without a multiple-win model,
the system will not work well.
the operation of the central medical facility. Without a multiplewin model, the system will not work
well.
The patients are nominally the
end customers in remote, rural
locations. These people are generally from underprivileged families,
and many live with some degree of
poverty. A solution should provide
better healthcare at an equivalent or
lower cost than the existing system.
Community healthcare workers
should benefit from new income
streams and job opportunities. For
the central medical facility, the
main benefit will be an increase
in operational efficiency with the
potential of increasing their patient
base. As a byproduct, our proposed
solution will also bring business
opportunities to suppliers and other
affiliated service providers.

Technology
radio Frequency Identification is
an established wireless technology. The use of "near field communications" or rFID for public

health in developing countries is
not completely new [3]. The solution described here is built on
established concepts, but leverages collaboration between community healthcare workers and a
central medical facility to design
a sustainable solution that can
potentially improve the quality
of life for people at remote, rural
locations.
In the solution design, the
mobile rFID read/write device
utilized by community healthcare
workers can be a proprietary piece
of equipment but it can also be a
specially-adapted, data communication-enabled mobile phone
that can communicate with the
remote centralized database of a
medical facility in addition to servicing rFID tags locally. Widearea data communication enables
remote transfer and retrieval of
medical record information in the
field. At the same time, the system allows read and writes of the
individual rFID-enabled "medical
card" locally.

Healthcare Facility
Rural Villages

Communication Link
RFID
Tag

RFID
Reader
Remote Patient
Community
and Personal
Healthcare
Identities
Workers

RFID
Reader

Facility-Based
Healthcare Services
and Medical Records

RFID
Tag
Fig. 2. The RFID e-health system.
38

Direct Outpatient
and Personal
Identities

These rFID cards are preferably "passive," meaning that the
energy for the rFID tag is harvested from the read/write device
through electrical induction; the
tag has no inherent power source.
High-frequency rFID tags using
13.56 MHz are frequently used for
very short range, high cost sensitive
applications. Several incompatible
standards exist for these including
ISO/IEC 14443 type A and B, ISO
15693 and FeliCa standards.
rFID, electronic medical record
system and mobile rFID read/write
devices all are mature technologies
that are often used in medical facilities, such as hospitals, for patient
tracking and enhancing work flow
[4]. The use of such devices for servicing outpatients in remote locations is still rare [5] for cost reasons,
even though the use of rFID for
asset tracking is widespread in pharmaceutical industries, laboratory
automation, and inventory management [6]. The solution proposed here
utilizes these mature components
of rFID systems to facilitate a selfsustainable community e-health
solution. This solution utilizes the
illustrative framework of a business
model that enables revenue sharing
between healthcare workers and a
central medical facility.

Basic System Configuration
The proposed rFID solution
needs to work in concert with an
electronic medical record system.
The basic configuration is shown
in Fig 2. Specifically, the rFID
system is used to register and monitor the transactions between the
community healthcare worker and
the patients in the field, and enables
the healthcare worker to upload and
download medical record information from the database at the central medical facility.
All patients are provided with
individual rFID medical cards or
their equivalent. An rFID medical
card may record a selection of the
patient's personal information such
as name, a photo, and potentially

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

SprING 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Spring 2013