Medical Device Link.

RFID’s advantages are being demonstrated today in the healthcare setting, often in the arena of nonmandated use. Deployments addressing supply chain management and hospital patient safety were among solutions described at RFID World in Boston.

Even though RFID is being touted as a solution for ensuring supply chain security and combating counterfeiting, other industry processes promising more-immediate value are driving RFID adoption. These include patient safety automation, cold-chain and specialty drug distribution management, and improved inventory management, such as with vendor-managed inventory (VMI), said Paul Fowler, vice president, healthcare strategy, Axway (Scottsdale, AZ), at the event.

Trends such as deaths from hospital errors (estimated at 195,000), rising healthcare spending, and a worsening healthcare labor shortage are driving RFID solutions, Fowler indicated.

Conference participants said that firms are not waiting for trading partners to implement common track and trace solutions before launching into RFID projects. Companies are utilizing RFID to offer a service to customers and to promote efficient internal processes.

Fowler noted that wider adoption of RFID still requires continued technical development, standard adoption, and increased industry collaboration. “No realistic timeline for adoption of RFID serialization currently exists,” Fowler said.

California, however, has reasserted its commitment to a January 2009 deadline for e-pedigree documentation. It stands firm despite strong interest expressed by pharma companies and pharmacists to have it pushed to 2011 or even later, says Virginia Herold, executive officer, California State Board of Pharmacy.

The pharmacy board enforcement committee and work group on e-pedigree reaffirmed the current law with the January 2009 deadline at a public meeting September 20.

“People were expecting the committee to extend the deadline,” says Herold. “We recognize that it has a very aggressive deadline, [but] the board will not move it without compelling evidence that industry won’t be ready. The e-pedigree law in the board’s view is a necessary measure to address drug counterfeiting.”

The most pressing and encompassing e-pedigree mandate, the state’s law requires an electronic e-pedigree record that documents ownership, initiated by the manufacture and passed along the chain of custody through to pharmacies. Manufacturers are required to serialize the lowest-size unit of packaging.

Highlighted at RFID World were “closed loop” RFID solutions. Aiming to prevent errors in medication dispensing, Jena University Hospital (Jena, Germany) this year implemented an auto-ID system to identify, track, and match medication accurately and in real time from the hospital pharmacy through to patient administration. Using a SAP Netweaver auto-ID infrastructure, medication tagged with HF tags at the pharmacy is tracked and matched digitally to individual patients uniquely identified with wristband reference codes.

ASD Healthcare, an AmerisourceBergen division that distributes specialty drugs, is using an RFID-based solution from Blue Vector Systems (Palo Alto, CA) in a vendor-managed inventory (VMI) program with hospitals.  Deployed at 50 hospitals, ASD is adding five hospitals a week to the network, said Nancy Anderson, CEO, Blue Vector.

The system uses proprietary Blue Vector network software and appliances that enable real-time VMI. ASD provides the hospitals with RFID-enabled Cubixx refrigerators that include an RFID reader for collecting data from tagged product on the shelves. An Edge Manager appliance connected to the cabinet keeps count of the items and monitors data collected from sensors showing temperature and door status.

Information on consumption, product expiration, and unacceptable temperatures is sent in encrypted XML files via a secure Internet connection to a Network Manager. Inventory is automatically replenished through ASD’s ERP inventory management software to which the manager is integrated. ASD assumes responsibility for drug quality and inventory.

Anderson said that real-time VMI using RFID to detect and correct errors when they occur and to eliminate product loss is revolutionizing distribution. “ASD has real-time visibility on hospital inventory. They can [determine] replenishment needs as the backend system is notified when inventory moves. They are getting more sales by avoiding out-of-stocks, and they can move product that is close to expiration to another point that has higher drug utilization. Hospitals are assured that they always have the inventory they need, [but] they don’t pay for it until is consumed,” said Anderson.

ASD shrink wraps the packaged product with active RFID tags from RF Code. At the hospital, the tags are removed and recycled for reuse so “the cost of the tags isn’t really a factor,” said John Beans, vice president of marketing, Blue Vector.
“There are typically hundreds of items in the refrigerator that may not always be arranged neatly. ASD chose to deploy with active tags and readers to ensure that the system was rock-solid reliable in terms of seeing every item in the cabinet,” says Beans.

Beans says that the software is a distributed application that can cover hundreds or even thousand of locations managed by a Network Manager or Global Manager from a single Web interface.

Though hurdles such as common standards remain for track and trace, industry continues to address the impediment of cost. Odin Technologies’ CEO Patrick Sweeney predicted that RFID reader costs will drop 40% to 50% in the coming months, after Intel’s launch of its fully integrated R1000 Gen 2 RFID reader chip. “Two or three handheld readers are in production that work with Intel’s new chip,” said Sweeney.  And RFID tags prices continue to drop, at 10% to 15% a year, he added.

David Vaczek
Senior Editor