RFID-based Real-time Localization System Enhancement for Retained Surgical Instrument in the Body: A Preliminary Case Study

Abstract

Retained surgical items are classified as preventable medical errors that cost the United States approximately $17 to $29 billion each year and is the most frequently reported sentinel event in 2011 as reported by the Joint Commission. This research proposes a new approach to decrease such preventable medical errors by developing a Radio Frequency Identification-based Real Time Locating System (RTLS) for surgical operations (RfSurg). Patient safety concern, e.g. the excessive exposure of x-ray to the patient after the surgery, is a major motivation behind the need of RTLS in this research. The use of RTLS techniques in this research may eliminate the need of the x-ray procedures and improve the time needed to find surgical equipment retained in the body. The results obtained from this non-clinical research have proven that the RFID-based RTLS is able to preliminarily answer the research question of: “If the surgical equipment is detected in the patient’s body, can it be located in a timely fashion during surgery?” This non-clinical study can be extended to further efforts for prototyping RfSurg with regard to its current limitations, e.g. elaborating some explanatory factors that could explain their relationship to the localization error.