Although he declined to discuss costs, Thuis said his team faces management pressure to show return on investment from the RFID deployments. The technology helps "to increase velocity in our supply chain, increase visibility, improve quality, create lean manufacturing, improve flexibility and ultimately lower costs," he told attendees. "Certainly these [applications] do pay off."

Another IT manager, Schon Crouse, mobility integration analyst at Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, said in an interview that laptops with embedded passive RFID chips are being purchased from Dell Inc. and slowly deployed to more than 1,000 hospital workers. One of the first applications, for tracking and preventing theft of the laptops using the tags, involves exterior doorways in the hospital complex that lock when a laptop is brought nearby. The concept is under development and has not yet been proven, he said.

"It promises to be an important benefit from a relatively cheap technology," Crouse said in an interview. "The cost of the RFID chips in the laptops was so incrementally small that we just had to take advantage of it."

John Wade, CIO at St. Luke's Health System in Kansas City, Mo., said RFID is being evaluated for patient tracking, partly to help doctors quickly find patients when they make rounds. St Luke's has 10 facilities throughout the Kansas City region and more than 1,300 hospital beds. However, Wade said, the reusable active RFID bracelets need to be lighter so they can be used on newborns, and they need to be sealed so they can be sterilized for reuse because they are too expensive to throw away.

"The technology is not there yet," Wade said in a presentation.