Early forays into the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) tagging in the healthcare industry were plagued with issues.¹ Despite advances over the past decade and the technology’s power to enhance patient safety and enable greater efficiencies, Andrew Meyer, Director of Global Standards at GS1 US, said many healthcare organizations remain “gun shy” about RFID.

“In the early 2000s, RFID was an expensive proposition that didn’t work as well as it could,” he noted. “But the landscape has changed. The technology has matured – it’s much more reliable and it can be used to address a variety of different use cases.”

Mike Isabell, Principal Engineer at CCL eAgile, agreed. However, he added, many healthcare stakeholders are holding on to myths about what RFID technology can and can’t do – and therefore are missing opportunities to leverage more sophisticated RFID solutions across the healthcare ecosystem.

“The two biggest misconceptions I’ve heard when it comes to using embedded RFID technology in healthcare is that it’s too slow and too expensive,” said Isabell. “But RFID has changed considerably. Now, when performing live demonstrations at our facility and at customer manufacturing sites, we have demonstrated that these tags can be applied and encoded at standard manufacturing line speeds – and they can retrofit existing packaging lines without major upgrades or equipment overhauls.”

Changing to meet modern demands

Today’s RFID chips, the small integrated circuits that store product information, have evolved to address issues including interference, security and interoperability.

“Like most electronics in the world, every year the chips have gotten smaller, more efficient and less expensive,” said Isabell. “The main benefit of these advances is that they made RFID an efficient, trusted way for drug manufacturers to communicate all essential product information to clinicians and hospital staff. The latest chips can store data like the global trade item number, serial number, batch number and drug expiration date without barcode scanning or a pharmacist manually reading the label.”

These more modern chips also eliminate the need to invest in specialized cloud solutions or pay for expensive proprietary lookup systems. They can quickly be integrated into manufacturing lines, which means embedded RFID technologies are no longer hindering pharmaceutical manufacturing.

“There are now innovative systems that support item level serialization, providing unmatched capabilities for filling and packaging lines,” Isabell explained. “They can effortlessly manage robust data packages of uniquely serialized items, all while maintaining exceptional read, code and validation speeds up to an impressive 600 units per minute on the production line.”

Held to a higher standard

The recently released new RFID Global Standards (GS1 TDS 2.0, SGTIN+ EPC Encoding) will ensure increasing efficiency in organizations’ abilities to record, pull and store data from tags. These standards support a single, standardized method for manufacturing source coding. According to Meyer, these new standards improve RFID’s efficiency for healthcare workers and eliminate the need to invest in different RFID reader systems to use pharmaceutical products with embedded tags.

“This allows for closed-loop systems and proprietary systems that hospitals already have today to accept the tags,” he said. “Manufacturers only have to use one encoding scheme for all healthcare and life sciences customers, which should help with adoption moving forward.”

Healthcare transformation benefits

Taken together, these advances in RFID technologies and standards provide healthcare organizations with greater opportunities to enhance patient safety. Meyer imagines that the industry will see more widespread RFID adoption in the coming years.

“There’s so much you can do. You could envision a scenario where a patient is allergic to a certain drug. With the RFID chip, you could ensure that the drug, or any compounds that contain it, never get within that patient’s reach if you have readers at the door,” he pointed out.

“But RFID can also help tedious, manual processes become more efficient,” Meyer said. “As more companies adopt [RFID], pharmacists or nurses won’t have to touch every product to scan it. They can use their RFID systems to locate things and take care of cycle counts, pull recalled items or increase security around scheduled products with ease. There are a lot of benefits.”

Isabell concurred – and said that modern embedded RFID technologies offer an innovative approach to solving many healthcare challenges.

“With the latest advances, RFID enables seamless communication and data exchange between different healthcare stakeholders, including manufacturers, distributors, pharmacies and healthcare providers,” he noted. “It ensures all parties can easily interact with pharmaceutical products at any po