Dutch academic hospital tracks endoscopy equipment and patient samples with Kathrein RFID

An academic hospital in the Netherlands has fitted RFID readers above doorways, inside storage cabinets and beside the lifts to keep track of medical equipment in its endoscopy department, and has since reused the same hardware to follow patient samples around the site. Kathrein Solutions, the German manufacturer of RAIN RFID readers and antennas whose kit was chosen, published the deployment as a case study on 13 October 2026, updated on 28 October 2026.

The end user is not named: Kathrein calls it only “an academic hospital in the Netherlands”, and the medical equipment company that first brought the idea in is unnamed too. The integrator is named, Opal Solutions GmbH, a German systems house that worked the problem alongside the equipment supplier. The reads run through customised software, which Kathrein does not attribute to anyone in particular.

Phase one: the endoscopy department

Staff could not reliably say where a piece of equipment was or whether it was ready to use, and in endoscopy, building the examination schedule around that uncertainty took real time. The hospital approached a medical equipment supplier, which brought in Opal Solutions to see whether RFID could cut the effort.

“After extensive testing, the project team opted for RFID technology from KATHREIN Solutions. The deciding factors in choosing this manufacturer were the ease of integration into the infrastructure and the excellent reading results achieved during the test setups,” said Jens Meyer, project manager at Opal Solutions GmbH.

Once the test rigs satisfied both the project team and the hospital, the IT department installed antennas and readers “discreetly” at strategic points: near entrances and exits, inside cabinets, by the lifts. That word is doing real work. A clinical corridor is not a warehouse aisle, and hardware that must disappear into the fabric of a working ward is a design constraint, not a marketing adjective: it pushes an installer towards flush or above-door mounting and antenna patterns that cover an opening without spraying the whole department.

Choke points rather than real-time location

Reading at doors, cabinets and lifts is choke-point tracking. The system learns where something is by seeing it cross a boundary, then assumes it stays in that zone until the next read. That is not a real-time location system, which follows continuous position and generally needs active tags, denser infrastructure or both. Choke-point reading with passive UHF tags answers the question most hospital asset problems ask, which room, which floor, in or out of the cupboard, at a fraction of the cost. It is also why the second phase was cheap.

Phase two: samples, by way of their boxes

Having proved itself in endoscopy, the system was extended to patient specimens. Samples travel in transport boxes, and in the software each sample is linked to the box carrying it: the German text uses “verheiratet”, literally married, for that pairing. The effect is one read, two answers. A reader sees the box, the software knows which samples are inside, and staff can locate a specimen whichever building the container has reached. Only the reusable box needs a tag, and the readers on the walls are the ones already installed for endoscopy.

The hardware, and the numbers Kathrein does not give

Kathrein lists an RRU 1400 reader with MidRange 100 degree PRO antennas and SMSH 60 degree EDGE antennas: the wide pattern for covering an opening or a cabinet interior, the narrow one for tighter, directional reads. The RRU 1400 is a UHF RAIN RFID reader, RAIN RFID being the industry term for passive UHF kit on the ISO 18000-63 and EPC Gen2v2 air interface, and per its datasheet the ETSI version works in the 865 to 868 MHz band used across Europe, with four antenna ports, Power over Ethernet and up to 30 dBm conducted output. The case study never states a frequency, but a Netherlands site sits in ETSI territory, so that is the band in play.

Kathrein claims an inventory overview available at any time, faster provisioning, better planning reliability and capacity utilisation, transparent transport routes and “a clearly measurable time savings”, and says staff feedback was consistently positive. It publishes no figures at all: no tag counts, no reader counts, no hours saved, no percentages. Worth saying plainly, because “clearly measurable” without the measurement is the one claim here a buyer cannot test.

Terms used above are unpacked in the RFID glossary; comparable deployments sit in the Healthcare section. See also Cornwall and Isles of Scilly pathology’s RFID sample transport racks and RFID cabinets for tissue grafts at a Kansas City hospital, both from October 2026.

Read more at https://www.kathrein-solutions.com/de/case-studies/case-study-transparenz-mit-rfid-im-krankenhaus-schaffen/