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Pharma RFID Adoption Still Slow
While the UHF Gen 2 specification offers a lot of improvement over Gen 1, Newmark says there are still some security measures lacking. What's needed, for example, is a way for a tag to authenticate an interrogator as it reads a tag, to ensure the reader is secure and legitimate.
Surprisingly, although the industry tends to be wary of governmental interference and mandates, survey respondents put the FDA's lack of pressure to support RFID in fourth place as a roadblock to the technology's adoption in the pharmaceutical market. Though the FDA stopped short of mandating the use of RFID to establish e-pedigrees, used to electronically document a drug's movement in the supply chain, it has asserted that RFID is "the most promising technology for implementing electronic track and trace in the drug supply chain," (see FDA Issues New 'Counterfeit Drug Task Force' Report).
Asked to rate the importance of certain criteria when selecting RFID technology for adoption, the companies surveyed chose read rates, security and cost as the top three characteristics, in that order. While frequency is considered a roadblock to adoption because of the HF-versus-UHF debate, survey respondents ranked frequency lowest in importance as a factor for choosing an RFID system. That suggests companies are "indifferent to frequency preference," the study says, and mostly concerned with options that are cost-effective, secure and reliable.
This may help to explain the industry's indecisiveness when it comes to which frequency to use. A whopping 88 percent said they don't know which RFID frequency will ultimately become the standard for item-level drug tracking. Only 6 percent chose UHF, while 4 percent selected HF. Two percent selected near-field UHF.
By mid-2007, Purdue Pharma plans to begin using Gen 2 Impinj Monza chips and interrogators equipped with near-field antennas in its pharmaceutical packaging lines. According to Newmark, Purdue has been using UHF RFID for a number of years to tag such items as bottles of its popular prescription painkiller (see Purdue Moving OxyContin RFID Pilot to Full Production), and is now looking to upgrade to near-field UHF for reading item-level tags.
"While a lot of people feel near-field UHF holds a lot of promise," he says, "there just isn't any large-scale data or proof out there about this."
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Surprisingly, although the industry tends to be wary of governmental interference and mandates, survey respondents put the FDA's lack of pressure to support RFID in fourth place as a roadblock to the technology's adoption in the pharmaceutical market. Though the FDA stopped short of mandating the use of RFID to establish e-pedigrees, used to electronically document a drug's movement in the supply chain, it has asserted that RFID is "the most promising technology for implementing electronic track and trace in the drug supply chain," (see FDA Issues New 'Counterfeit Drug Task Force' Report).
Asked to rate the importance of certain criteria when selecting RFID technology for adoption, the companies surveyed chose read rates, security and cost as the top three characteristics, in that order. While frequency is considered a roadblock to adoption because of the HF-versus-UHF debate, survey respondents ranked frequency lowest in importance as a factor for choosing an RFID system. That suggests companies are "indifferent to frequency preference," the study says, and mostly concerned with options that are cost-effective, secure and reliable.
This may help to explain the industry's indecisiveness when it comes to which frequency to use. A whopping 88 percent said they don't know which RFID frequency will ultimately become the standard for item-level drug tracking. Only 6 percent chose UHF, while 4 percent selected HF. Two percent selected near-field UHF.
"While a lot of people feel near-field UHF holds a lot of promise," he says, "there just isn't any large-scale data or proof out there about this."
