La tracciabilita del paziente in strutture ospedaliere

High volumes of information about drugs, clinical examinations, results of clinical analyses, and diagnoses up to the dismission of every patient circulate inside a health structure. All these information are usually recorded on paper files and then transferred in the electronic archive of the department and in the centralized database of the health structure. This process increases the probability of error due to the difficulty of interpretation of the handwritings and to wrong typing; this prob- ability of error increases in the very frequent case, in which a patient is transferred to a new department. The Department of Technology and Health of the Italian National Institute of Health (Istituto Superiore di Sanità) have started an experimentation, in collaboration with the Mediterranean Institute for Transplantation and Advanced Specialized Therapies (ISMETT) of Palermo, that will allow the evaluation of the impact of a new electronic system of traceability of the patient, based on the RFId (Radio Frequency Identification) technology, on the management systems of a modern health structure.