Medical Cabinets Open Their Doors to RFID
By Kevin MacDonald
RFID is a hot topic in the pharmaceutical and healthcare supply chains due to pedigree laws, counterfeiting, product security, and a need for more efficient movement of products from manufacturers to patients. While most of the focus is on RFID for use in pedigree applications, the real action today is in the hospital and patient care facilities at the point of dispensing. RFID-enabled medical cabinets offer substantial benefits today across the healthcare supply chain from manufacturing through distribution to hospitals and other patient care providers.
RFID medical cabinets are in demand because they fulfill a number of daily needs from providing added security to the patient drug supply to automating dose recording, patient billing, and replenishment ordering. Patient healthcare in the U.S. is provided by highly trained professionals who are increasingly asked to do more with less administrative support. RFID medical cabinets are being used to automate routine tasks allowing heathcare professionals to spend more time on patient care while simultaneously improving security and safety within patent care facilities.
However, it is important to note that not all RFID medical cabinets are created equal. Different use cases and businesses models have different cabinet requirements. The right RFID medical cabinet for you will be based on your use case and the nature of the items you are tracking. ODIN technologies recently published the industry's first RFID medical cabinet benchmark to provide end users with an objective evaluation of current products and their different approaches. The findings provide a roadmap for RFID medical cabinet selection today.
Business Models Drive Cabinet Design and Requirements
It is important to note that RFID medical cabinets have been designed to meet specific user requirements. The users of cabinets and distributors of the cabinets tend to fit into one of three models:
1. Hospitals or clinics that want to track owned product or assets for billing accuracy, stock management, and regulatory compliance
2. Distributors or manufacturers that have consignment inventories in the field that need tracking for billing and usage purposes
3. Manufacturers that want better visibility into product usage and sales of the product out in the field
Each business use has specific goals, but the model employed drives the type of cabinet selected. For example, a hospital that needs to track owned product will want to manage the inventory within its four walls. Sharing data across hospitals or clinics likely will only stretch as far as the hospital network. These users typically need to be able to track usage to a particular patient. By tracking usage to the patient level, the hospital derives accurate billing and compliance.
When distributors or manufacturers work on consignment, the goal is to track the product usage to a physician or dispenser of the consigned product. The billing is tracked at a facility level or a cost center level rather than at a patient level. This requires less infrastructure at a given site, but it does require an infrastructure to track across different hospitals and provider networks.
The manufacturers that want to use cabinets to increase sales and visibility are similar to the distributors that are tracking consignment inventories. When cabinets are empty, they need to notify sales reps to refill the cabinets and they can take usage data to track where the business is growing.
RFID medical cabinet vendors and their products
Thankfully, cabinet vendors are targeting specific parts of the market with their products. ODIN technologies identified over 30 manufacturers who claimed to have RFID medical cabinet products; however, the vast majority of these vendors provide only custom built solutions and many have no products in use by customers today. The custom cabinets can be attractive because they can be built to specification. On the other hand, the custom units also can be higher cost because they do not benefit from scale production and software related features need to be built from scratch.
Although it is still early in the market, three vendors currently have products available for use off the shelf: TAGSYS RFID, Terso Solutions, and Mobile Aspects. In addition, ASD Healthcare has already deployed its Cubixx cabinet for consignment inventory.
TAGSYS RFID focuses on providing a platform that can be customized to deliver a specific use case. They have focused on RFID performance and security, but any manufacturer, distributor, or provider will need to develop the application to suit its specific needs. TAGSYS has focused on building a repeatable, high performance cabinet that it sell as a module to companies that wish to market cabinets to end-users.
Terso Solutions focuses on the consignment market with a cabinet that has a web-based service to track fleets of cabinets distributed across the country. Its cabinets come in refrigerated and ambient models and focus on ease of deployment without the complication of dealing with screens or other inputs. A user simply presents their ID card and removes product.
Mobile Aspects focuses on the hospital environment where patient tracking is critical. Specific business rules about dosages and adverse reactions can be programmed into the cabinet and tracked so that mistakes can be prevented. The hospital manages its own inventory on the cabinet or a server deployed at the hospital and detailed workflows are enabled by the Mobile Aspects software.
Important Attributes
There are several attributes that are important when evaluating a cabinet, and they break down into two general categories: scientific results and use case requirements. The ODIN RFID Medical Smart Cabinet ™ benchmark addresses both. From a scientific perspective, the key categories include:
* Determining if different product materials will adversely effect performance
* Testing if the orientation of the product inside the cabinet impedes performance
* Checking for dead zones or null spots inside the cabinet
* Assessing how many products can be put in a cabinet
* Identifying read zones outside the cabinet or RF leakage that may cause incorrect inventory tracking or a security risk
* Evaluating how closely product may be placed together inside a cabinet and still ensure a high read rate
Each cabinet has different performance attributes. Some of the drivers include where the antennas are placed inside the cabinet, what frequency is being utilized, and the construction of the door. However, it is important to consider the scientific RF performance as the hurdle in your selection process. No matter how good the other features may be, without consistent and accurate readability within the RFID medical cabinet, it will fail to meet your operating expectations. From a business perspective, three general areas are important:
* Security and access control
* Workflow capabilities
* Technical considerations such as monitoring, printing, standards, and configurability
Each manufacturer's approach to the market determines how well they've performed. There were some unique characteristics that each vendor brought that the other vendors did not provide. For example, Terso Solutions has a web-based interface to remotely manage inventory and Mobile Aspects has a screen that allows patient information to be evaluated when removing product from the cabinet.
Putting it all together
The medical cabinet market has moved from barcode and manual inventories to the automated tracking capabilities of RFID. Three vendors offer solid products today and many others will build you a custom unit based on your specification. However, the applicability of any RFID medical cabinet to your use case will depend on the product you wish to track and your daily requirements for use.
The good news is that manufacturers, distributors, hospitals, and patients are benefiting from RFID today. The increased used of smart medical cabinets will provide numerous benefits to all three constituencies and is a good sign for the growth of RFID in the healthcare sector.
Kevin MacDonald is the VP of Client Architecture at ODIN technologies. ODIN technologies' benchmark is available online at www.odintechnologies.com/store.html.
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