RFID and Smart Packaging in healthcare

Problems in the healthcare industry that can be tackled with smart tags and smart packaging

Some serious problems that can be tackled with smart tags or packaging:

Of course, there are many other aspects to this. The efficiency of the food and pharmaceutical supply chains can be improved by a factor of ten using smart labels according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). That may mean one tenth of the stocks, labour cost, stockouts, crime (theft, counterfeiting etc), far better recalls and warranty management and so on. Lower costs can mean that proper healthcare becomes available to more people.

One physician talking at the IDTechEx Smart Tagging in Healthcare conference in 2003 said “I did not study for seven years to become a doctor only to spend most of my time filling in forms”. The fact that the forms are often on a computer screen these days is little compensation. It led him to automate blood sampling using radio tagging in his hospital.

This makes the job more pleasant, reduces errors and saves a great deal of cost. Such multiple paybacks with smart tagging or smart packaging are commonplace. The sheer pervasiveness of these technologies lead us to describe applications as diverse as smart glucometers, smart catheters, electronic staff location and portable panic buttons in this report yet we are still only describing the very small beginnings of this embryonic subject.

High ambitions

Beyond tackling the high profile challenges of the healthcare industry, we now have some ambitious projects at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to automate away many day-to-day errors and dangers:

• Imagine it becoming a physical impossibility for a pharmacist to dispense contraindicated pharmaceuticals to a customer, or even for a patient to remove them together from a medicine cabinet.

• Imagine tracing even a blister pack of a few tablets to the place and time when they were stolen, and providing irrefutable evidence in court.

• Consider being able to monitor how many products are in a multi-pack without opening it, even knowing their provenance and other details.

• Imagine the prefect product recall procedure and supply chain management at a price and integrity that makes today’s procedures look very backward indeed.

• Can counterfeiting of pharmaceuticals be better monitored and more counterfeiters brought to book in a more timely fashion, with better court evidence?

• Could more criminals be deterred from such practices in future, claiming so many lives each year and damaging brand names?

• With increasingly disparate pricing forced on the industry by recent events in Africa, how can illegal product diversion be monitored more thoroughly and rapidly and controlled, where it is legal to do so?

Indeed, in Europe, legal product diversion is now costing the pharmaceutical industry $2.4 billion yearly and damaging its ability to develop new drugs, according to the Financial Times. Such things also need to be better monitored.

These and similar thoughts are exercising the minds of people in and around the pharmaceutical industry and new smart labels are beginning to provide some of the answers. The Internet of Things, where ultra-low-cost radio tags in vast numbers are interrogated over the internet, could provide much more within a few years.

Indeed, the technologies described at this conference or in the Smart Tagging & Packaging in Healthcare report can even help to tackle the outrage of 20 million people dying yearly of preventable diseases across the world and one billion going to bed hungry every night.
 

"I learned a lot, met people doing interesting stuff, and now have to sort out where I want to go next! So much to consider!!" Roz Ben-Chitrit, Avery Dennison

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