In an article in the latest issue of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, researchers propose using RFID to help healthcare workers access medical records. In many developing countries 75% of the population works on rural farms. It is difficult for people for people to get to central medical facilities. Hospitals encourage people with outpatient needs to go to community-based healthcare workers. 
It is hard for community healthcare workers to access patients’ medical records. In some cases patients have to maintain their own paper records that they manually sync with the central hospital records when they have a chance. Such a system is clearly unreliable.
One idea is to provide patients a passive RFID bracelet or ID card as an electronic ID to access their medical records. 13.56MHz RFID tags are low cost and powered by through induction by the reader. They can store a patient ID and a few kilioBytes of critical medical data. The reader could use a 2G mobile Internet connection, often available even in undeveloped regions, to download patients’ medical records.
RFID is used widely in the medical industry. Researchers say it makes sense to extend this to patients who use rural outreach programs.
This system would increase costs to patients. I asked one of the authors, Ali Zalzala, if this would make it even harder for providers of scientific medicine to complete with less expensive traditional and alternative approaches. He said this is a big issue. Patients typically pay 10% of the cost, with NGOs paying the rest. They system has to be cheap so it doesn’t make the healthcare system more dependent on aid. 
Ali said he visited a fully equipped hospital in India that performed only a couple operations a week because the population did not understand or believe in the medical services offered. This makes outreach more important. Outreach workers from a central medical facility collect cash payments from patients. An electronic record of a patient interaction that includes RFID and GPS make it harder for fraud to occur.
I asked Ron Pulvermacher, president of Matrix Product Development, which specializes in RFID-based product development, if this could be done affordably. He said an NFC tag along might not hold enough memory. A NFC tag with a microprocessor and Flash memory would cost $10 in quantities under 10,000 and $5 in high quantities. The next iPhone purportedly will support NFC, so it could serve as the Internet-enabled GPS-enabled reader in this system.
Ron mentioned an alternative would be to use an inexpensive laptop with mobile Internet service. This made me medical record records could be stored on small computers or even on phones and synced to the hospital’s database whenever the provider returns to the hospital, obviating the need for rural internet service. The ID portion could be accomplished with a traditional picture ID. As RFID prices decrease, however, passive RFID tags may become a standard part of an ID card.