Technol Health Care. 2024;32(2):675-693. doi: 10.3233/THC-230027.
During an outbreak such as COVID-19, hospital staff needs to be in close contact with all types of patients visiting the hospital and the risk of cross-infection is extremely high. Payment and medication pickup is a mandatory part of a patient's hospital visit, with direct contact between healthcare workers and patients, and long waiting times in the hospital area, which can easily lead to the spread of disease infection.
This paper designed the prototype of a contactless smart medicine cabinet based on RFID technology and optimized the patient consultation and medication pickup process to address these problems.
We conducted a 50-day field observation of patients for consultation and medication pickup at the First Hospital in H city, Jiangsu Province, China, and randomly timed 1600 sets of data from Surgery (ophthalmology) and Internal patients, then we designed the prototype of a contactless smart medicine cabinet based on RFID technology, optimized the patient consultation and medication pickup process, comparing the traditional and intelligent models using AnyLogic.
The results show that this contactless medicine cabinet was able to reduce the time taken by patients in consultation and medicine pickup by 18.74 minutes, increasing the overall efficiency of the consultation by 32.20%. The simulation revealed that this contactless intelligent medication pickup model was able to reduce the time taken by patients in consultation and medicine pickup, increasing the overall efficiency of the consultation, effectively reducing the frequency of contact between healthcare workers and patients, and reducing the risk of disease infection.
The proposed technical model provides a new idea to solve the problems of long queues, low efficiency and high risk of infection for patients to consult and get medicine during epidemics. Especially within hospitals it has important theoretical and practical implications for epidemic prevention and control as well as future hospital management.
在 COVID-19 等疫情爆发期间，医院工作人员需要与所有类型的来院患者密切接触，交叉感染的风险极高。缴费和取药是患者就诊的强制性环节，医护人员与患者直接接触，且在医院区域等候时间长，容易导致疾病感染传播。
本研究设计了一种基于 RFID 技术的非接触式智能药柜原型，优化了患者就诊和取药流程，以解决这些问题。
我们对江苏省 H 市第一医院的患者就诊和取药流程进行了为期 50 天的实地观察，随机抽取了 1600 组外科（眼科）和内科患者的数据，并设计了一种基于 RFID 技术的非接触式智能药柜原型，优化了患者就诊和取药流程，使用 AnyLogic 对传统模型和智能模型进行了比较。
结果表明，这种非接触式药柜能够将患者就诊和取药的时间缩短 18.74 分钟，提高整体就诊效率 32.20%。模拟结果表明，这种非接触式智能取药模式能够缩短患者就诊和取药的时间，提高整体就诊效率，有效减少医护人员与患者的接触频率，降低疾病感染风险。
所提出的技术模型为解决疫情期间患者就诊和取药排队时间长、效率低、感染风险高的问题提供了新思路。特别是在医院内，对于疫情防控和未来医院管理具有重要的理论和实际意义。
