Adaptive knowledge-based system for health care applications with RFID-generated information

Health care organizations are under increased pressure to continually improve their operational efficiency while simultaneously decreasing the overall operating costs with no appreciable degradation in the delivered quality of health care. Given the nature of such an environment where lives are at stake, it is natural to operate under a larger safety factor where risks are kept close to their necessary minimum. RFID tags are increasingly being used in health care organizations to reduce errors and to generally improve the effectiveness of the core processes. We develop an adaptive knowledge-based system framework for health care and illustrate the proposed framework using three example applications from the French health care environment. Specifically, we consider management of bottled gas delivery as well as tracking and tracing surgical equipment and prosthetic ancillaries within a health care environment using the proposed framework with item-level information generated through RFID tags. We use simulation analyses to study the underlying dynamics. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.