Surgeons and hospital staff also belong to group who their life and work are associated with high stress, which make them also the forgetful ones. I have heard quite a number of cases that instrument or sponges left behind the patients’ body during surgery, which mostly caused them profound pain almost like dying. In order to avoid this happen again, doctors will make use of RFID technology, which they’re going to attach RFID chips to surgical sponges and then waved a wand over a patient after surgery. The chips will alert the doctor if a sponge was left inside the patients’ body.
Siemens and other companies are now working out the surgical sponges that are equiped with RFID chips, which hospitals can just use RFID readers to wand the patients before releasing them from the operation room.
via [Medgadget]
April 24th, 2010 at 11:05 am
[...] badges and a couple of medical uses such as tracking patients or used together with surgical sponges to avoid mistakes of leaving sponges accidentally inside the patients’ bodies during [...]