In the past, hospitals were places where patients underwent surgeries, recovered and convalesced. They still do today of course, but these days, surgeries require a large amount of special parts, that are either used and thrown away, or are implanted directly into the patient’s body.

1. Medical Parts generally have a shelf life. This means that they must be used within a certain number of days of manufacture.
    
2. There is no automated system at present to intimate or give warnings when the parts will cross their expiry dates, hence either a large number of parts may have to be thrown away before they are used, or worse, date-expired parts may be actually used.
   

1. Audit trail of expensive hospital parts usage.
    
2. Optimum utilization of inventory will lead to lower inventory carrying costs, lesser stock outs and less number of”surprises”.
    
3. This system could be a big boon for government and public hospitals who work on tight budgets.
    
4. Patient safety is not compromised while meeting lower operating cost goals.

The RFID based solution would be to embed each part as it comes in with an electronic label (an RFID tag). The RFID tag would have a unique ID number which is linked to the material database, having all relevant information about the part. The electronic labeled part is now put into a smart shelf.The smart shelf is composed of a built in antenna and an RFID reader, which keeps track of all the RFID tags inside (the medical parts).

The hospital smart shelf may become the norm, rather than the exception in all publicly funded hospitals and even in privately owned ones.Costs of such systems are dropping, but even now the ROI is easily justified, it will be impossible to ignore in the days to come.