UHF RFID tagging can help to address medicine waste and more, writes Susanne Hazrati, Global Marketing Manager RAIN RFID Logistics, NXP Semiconductors
Around one billion therapeutic drugs are prescribed or provided by physicians in the US each year. Another 360 million are provided in hospital emergency rooms. Just under half the US population has taken prescribed drugs in the last month; a quarter are on three or more.
The enormous volume and value of medicinal drugs has many consequences. Hospitals, in particular, might carry thousands of drugs, with popular drugs then needed in thousands of doses. Managing these volumes provides significant logistical challenges: storing them so that they can only be accessed by authorised staff; ensuring any medicine can be found urgently as required; dispensing them in sequence so they don’t miss ‘use-by’ dates, and ordering new batches in good time.
Any wastage or loss needs to be vigorously combated: unused drugs have a human cost and a financial one. Waste means extra money is required to replace those medicines and/or fewer people can be treated. Exact waste and loss figures are unavailable – healthcare is a vast and complex industry – but figures between 3% and 7% are cited. With pharmaceuticals being such a high-cost, high-volume sector, this equates to billions of dollars in unused healthcare and additional expenses.
Waste also occurs in terms of how skilled professionals spend their time. A recent survey reports that more than seven out of ten hospital administrators experience ‘significant problems’ with operations or procedures being cancelled because the correct equipment or medications cannot be found or are out of stock. Nurses say they spend twice as much time as they think they should ‘hunting and gathering’, as opposed to that time being devoted to direct patient care.
Fortunately, technology has provided at least part of the solution to managing inventories of medicinal drugs and equipment effectively. Historically, inventory has been managed through optical labelling, first written, then supplemented by barcodes and QR codes. This provides a means to obtain good information on any particular bottle, filled syringe or ampoule. But it falls down unless the item in question is in line of sight, with the label facing forward. And when there are hundreds, or thousands, of items in one place, manual handling becomes a source of frustration, wasting time and creating delays in patient care.
To become more useful, and support the idea of the hospital developing a digital twin of its inventory, the technology of tagging needs to be supplemented by another that can read items en-masse, without direct line of sight.
In response, the RFID technology that’s already been in widespread use for inventory applications in retail appears to be a great candidate to solve these challenges in hospitals and help create digital twins for their inventories. This takes the form of a battery-less tag attached to items that can be scanned using a reader more quickly, from a greater distance than previous options and without line of sight. This has provided a very positive move forward, and RFID solutions have been widely adopted across many industries like retail and logistics, as well as for airline baggage tags.
Tracking and tracing is one of the most adopted use cases for RFID, also known as Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) RFID, beside inventory management. NXP’s products with this technology carry the name UCODE. UHF RFID continues to provide tiny, battery-less tags for items, and improves its performance and sensitivity continuously – nowadays 1000+ tagged items can be read in a second, with a radius of 10 meters or more. The technology has been adopted extremely rapidly across multiple industries, with 45 billion such chips sold in 2023 alone, according to the global consortium, the RAIN Alliance.
The technology is perfect for an environment where hundreds of items might enter or leave every minute, such as a centralised hospital supply room or pharmacy, for example. In these kinds of environments, items have historically had a high risk of being misplaced, as noted above, creating waste and delays. The technology can help to ensure medicines are tracked and traced across the supply chain, right from laboratories or factories to storage facilities, and to hospital wards.
This ensures that as soon as a shipment of drugs enters the hospital, it can be tallied with the details provided by the suppliers. It can be logged into the inventory, with each item’s details, such as its use-by date, and reference numbers for detailed information about its usage automatically registered on the hospital system. When items are needed, they can be located reliably and swiftly, with specific doses that need to be used first identified to avoid wastage. Equally, drugs that are no longer safe to use can be automatically identified and removed from the inventory.
UHF RFID tags have a few other tricks up their antenna, too. In addition to fast reading performance without line of sight, they can contain more memory and so can carry more information, such as expiration dates. This information and the communication between the tag and the reader can be encrypted using AES-128 cryptography standards. This means that drugs can be authenticated as having been created by the registered producer, helping to combat the growing scourge of counterfeit drugs. The same encryption can also help to ensure that patient samples can be identified securely. In addition, advances in radio antenna technology mean that tags can be read in the proximity of liquids and metals that have historically created very operationally challenging reading environments.
As healthcare facilities come under increasing pressure to deliver value for money for patients, alongside improved outcomes, ways to improve efficiency and reduce waste are increasingly sought after. Equally they seek to optimise healthcare processes, enhance product safety and avoid any medication errors. This applies equally to publicly owned facilities as well as the private sector. Understanding where all medical assets are located, along with ready reference to their use-by dates, medical reference details and any restrictions on usage, is a vital step in achieving these goals which is already achievable using today’s technology.
Susanne Hazrati is Global Marketing Manager UCODE and is responsible for the implementation of RAIN RFID technology in emerging markets. Working almost a decade at NXP, Susanne is experienced in various passive technologies and is well connected through the ecosystem value chain.
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