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RFID technology shows significant potential for transforming healthcare, yet few studies assess this potential. Our study measured the effectiveness of using RFID as a bed trigger: a tool to accelerate identification of empty beds. We made a small alteration in the discharge process to associate RFID tags with patients and created an RFID-based system that automatically determined discharge time. For each patient, we evaluated the difference in the discharge times recorded manually by the current process and the RFID-based system. The study was conducted on 86 patients over 2 months in 2 physically separate multi-specialty units. Compared to the preexisting process, the RFID-based system identified empty beds >20 minutes earlier 67% of the time with an average of 25 minutes and median of 9 minutes earlier. Hospital leadership defined an improvement of approximately 10 minutes as significant. With minimal investment, our small-scale study lead hospital leadership to begin planning RFID deployment.

Approaches to the development of information systems in large health care institutions range from prototyping to conventional development of large scale production systems. This paper discusses the development of the SignOut System at Mount Sinai Medical Center, which was designed in 1997 to capture vital resident information. Local need quickly outstripped proposed delays for building a production system and a prototype system quickly became a production system. By the end of 2002 the New SignOut System was built to create an integrated application that was a true production system. In this paper we discuss the design and implementation issues in moving from a prototype to a production system. The production system had a number of advantages, including increased organizational visibility, integration into enterprise resource planning and full time staff for support. However, the prototype allowed for more rapid design and subsequent changes, less training, and equal to or superior help desk support. It is argued that healthcare IT systems may need characteristics of both prototype and production system development to rapidly meet the changing and different needs of healthcare user populations.