RFID in Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Applications

How medical industries are using RFID to play catch up, keep up, and get ahead

By Dr. Peter Harrop

RFID in healthcare and pharmaceutical applications found 2006 to be a pivotal year. At last, there was widespread adoption of patient compliance monitoring blisterpacks in drug trials. These packs, costing $15 or so, improve the quality of data gathered in drug trials by recording which tablet was taken when - and thanks to RFID in the pack, relate this information to a specific patient without unreliable manual input. With 40%-50% of patients taking their medicine incorrectly, that reform was long overdue. Leaders in best practice now include the U.S. National Institutes of Health using 30,000 such packs to trial their new antibiotic Azithromycin and Novartis.

Another wakeup call was heeded by hospitals. They typically lose up to 15% of assets by value every year. Indeed, modern healthcare has reported that the typical hospital can not locate 15%-20% of its assets and time spent searching for them equates to $1,900 per nurse. Active RFID is now used, in which a battery in the tag gives long range or sensing capabilities. Particularly popular in the last year has been the more sophisticated version of this called Real Time Locating Systems (RTLS), which locates tagged items at a distance without them needing to pass near the reader electronics. About 100 hospitals have adopted RTLS for either key assets or staff. Particularly popular has been the new version that does not need its own infrastructure because the tag locates itself using a pre-existing WiFi infrastructure. This saves cost and problems of short lived tag batteries, while expensive tags have largely been overcome in the last year. However, there are still concerns about software maintenance, availability, and accuracy with some such schemes, and even the risk of overloading a WiFi network used for life saving actions such as data capture by physicians in transit. Conventional RTLS systems from Trenstar, Wavetrend, WhereNet and others have therefore also proved popular in hospitals in the last year. Indeed, versions that let a nurse press an alarm and be instantly located have been valued in dealing with the increase in violence towards medical staff.

The world's largest database of case studies of RFID in Action is the IDTechEx RFID Knowledgebase (www.rfidbase.com) and this has seen healthcare applications rise to 8.1% (199) of all cases, so it is now the sixth most important applicational sector for RFID by this measure. By money spent, healthcare is even higher in the pecking order and progress is rapid. With FDA encouragement, many pharmaceutical manufacturers in the U.S. are now tagging even the smallest containers of tablets to provide full reverse audit at item level ("pedigree") to combat the rise in counterfeiting.

The only disappointment is the perseverance with the old contacted smart cards for patient records and access, given the fact that cards with contacts are disabled by the slightest amount of moisture and dirt and have to be put in a slot the right way up and the right way round.

Contactless (RFID) cards should be used. They simply have to be held near the reader. They are more reliable with longer lives. That is why they are the norm for bus and train systems and are being adopted by the major credit and debit card brands. It's time for healthcare professionals to catch up.

Dr. Peter Harrop PhD, FIEE, FCIM is Chairman of IDTechEx Ltd. He was previously Chief Executive of Mars Electronics, Chairman of Pinacl plc, and Chairman of Flying Null, the chipless tag company. He has carried out RFID consultancy for Kodak, GEC, Manchester Airport, Diageo, among others, and he lectures and consults internationally on low-cost RFID. He can be reached at p.harrop@idtechex.com.