I was thinking more along the lines of an open medical device interface standard, for power, signals and connections to existing form-factor, active RFID, passive RFID devices and wireless, i.e. simply develop existing software and hardware standards, that could be used to address all of the above issues by designers & manufacturers.
Thus allowing purchasers to implement their preferred active RFID, passive RFID, or wireless solution depnding upon the portability, capital cost, or risk (maintenance or medical related), associated with the medical device(s), perhaps.
Time-keeping, self-test diagnostics, event-logging, etc, are already being performed by medical devices although they don't, yet, seem to have a common error-data logging format. RFID tracking that includes storage of service data, test results and asset information is apparently with us for maintenance purposes, as is wireless networking of course.
It's possible that a device can be tracked, transmit diagnostics including current maintenance status and record events whilst maintaining an accurate time standard referenced to some central network time. Possibly not in real-time (depending upon location and RFID/Wireless technology used) but near enough to make it useful to us.
All that's needed to make it realisable is demand for it (for governance/security purposes) and a common standard so that there's commonality both in terms of the medical device software & hardware interfaces to existing/proposed RFID & wireless device(s) and between the RFID & wireless device(s) and the (secure) host network.
This sort of standard can be "thrashed out" by interested experts in healthcare, in the private sector and could be added to the existing open RFID and wireless standards. Personally I'm not an expert and not particularly interested, either, but the technology to do it has been around for a while.
In fact it probably exists, as I've described exactly, somewhere, but instead of an active RFID link it's possibly implemented in wireless format and most definitely using hardwired connections, i.e. existing PC network for non-portable devices. Nothing really novel there then.
The suggestion of an open medical device interface standard for (optional) RFID or wireless "ports", to host such a device, and the actual need to integrate tracking (for security/retrieval purposes), medico-legal (accurate time/event logs) and maintenance (diagnostic/maintenance logs) functions, to make it worthwhile implementing at all, are possibly the only novel thing that's been discussed.
Despite all this "pie in the sky stuff" I still think there's a place for passive RFID for non-active medical devices and other property belonging to the NHS since I regularly hear of lots of it disappearing from our NHS trust, for example. I say keep it simple and reliable, build on top of existing technology, and don't rely too much on complex networks - hence I say RFID - to make it more "economical".
The physical technology or hardware used to implement the suggestions made, as ever, are likely to be the simplest and cheapest. A post in another thread, on uses of RFID, I made a while back, suggested all of these ideas Geoff. Perhaps we could share the 5%, eh?
