US Army to RFID tag medical documents

3M has won a $3.7m, three-year contract with the US Army to RFID tag medical documents.

The company will design and build a system to chip the documents at the US facility in Ford Hood, Texas for more than 150,000 servicemen and women and their families, to enable the paper to be tracked whilst on the shelves.

3M will also develop the software for the tagging project and train military staff in how to use the system.

The rollout is intended to cut out errors resulting from human filing and retrieval and speed up treatment for personnel.

The US Tax Court and the Tax Division of the Department of Justice have already signed up to use RFID to manage their documents, while numerous libraries in Asia, Europe and the US are using the technology to track books. It's thought some 200 million books have already been tagged.