50,000 Dutch Nurses use NFC phones on a daily basis

Nedap enables 50,000 Dutch Nurses to use NFC phones on a daily basis

This last week Nedap passed a milestone that pretty no other organization can match when the number of nurses in the Netherlands that use NFC phones daily exceeded 50,000, reported M.O.R. When we think of NFC trials and services we imagine them happening within the last couple of years, however, Nedap have been deploying NFC phones to nurses for the past 10 years. The original field trial was put together with Nokia, Samsung and of course, Nedap, the Netherlands based security and identification specialist firm. The project has continued to a point that the team have trialled five generations of NFC phones. These NFC phones include the Nokia 3220-NFC, Nokia 6131-NFC, Nokia 6312-NFC, Samsung S5230-Star-NFC and currently now in use is the Samsung Star S2 and the Nokia C7. It’s amazing to think that OEMs are struggling to get NFC phones to market when Nokia and Samsung trail blazed NFC phones ten years ago.

How Dutch Nurses use NFC phones with Nedap

“The nurses we are talking about here are nurses that provide home healthcare. They provide care to the patients in the comfort of their own home. In the old days, nurses needed to write down when they arrived, how long they stayed and what they did for each patient they visited,” said Bart Ten Brinke. ”All this information was entered into a central system, which in turn sent bills to the patients. All this administration was error prone and a big hassle for the nurses. Instead of digitizing this problem by using something like a PDA, we opted to design a completely automated solution,” Brinke added.

When a nurse enters a patient’s home, they touch a patient card with their phone. When the nurse leaves they simply touch the patient card again and the system takes care of the administrative function so that there is more time for healthcare matters. This is one of the early use cases for NFC. What is amazing is that it hasn’t been promoted and taken on all over the world, especially since other NFC phones have become available on the market.