U.S. Orthopedic Maker Plans to Track Surgical Kits

According to Parker, the partnership between Symmetry and Solstice puts the two companies in a good spot to begin working with an orthopedics device supplier. "In terms of working with the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), there is a lot of interest," Parker says. "Now, it is about finding the right OEM that wants to utilize the RFID technology. We are now at the point where we can respond to that need."

For the past several months, Solstice has been testing a variety of active and passive RFID tags it has developed, to determine which tags are most suitable to use on surgical implements and medical implants (see Lab Focuses on Testing Tags for Health-Care Applications). The first tag the company intends to release commercially, in April, is a rigid EPC Gen 2 passive UHF tag. In addition, Solstice eventually expects to resell other vendors' passive HF and LF tags, as well as some active tags. Sands anticipates that most of his company's solutions for supply chain applications will be based on standards, but for closed-loop apps, it might consider proprietary air-interface protocols.

The RFID tags are intended to help track and trace the movement of medical devices and instruments up and down the supply chain, and to assist organizations in accounting for all the devices within a certain case. What's more, the tags can document when an instrument goes through the required sterilization processes, thus ensuring proper care has been taken and improving patient safety.

Other organizations within the medical device supply chain are already tagging products. Last summer, Biomet, an orthopedic implants manufacturer, conducted an RFID project in which it added 13.56 MHz passive tags to five kits, each containing about 100 instruments and parts used to implant orthopedic knees (see Biomet Tags Its Orthopedic Knees). The RFID tags were designed to help make sure each set was complete before it was shipped to a surgeon, and to determine which parts or instruments were used or missing when the kits returned to Biomet.

Moreover, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is investigating how the use of a unique device identification (UDI) system, such as one making use of RFID technology, might improve patient safety by tracking medical devices in the supply chain (see FDA Reviews Comments on Device-ID System).