Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals' Smart Cabinet Tracks Contrast Agents

In 2003, the JCAHO created an additional incentive for improving the tracking of contrast media: It added contrast agents to its definition of medications. With that new classification came more rigid requirements for the management of storage and documentation, which must then be reported back to the JCAHO. Hospitals that fail to comply with Joint Commission rules risk being denied payment from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) for patients who use Medicare and Medicaid. Tracking the product on paper, Bertetti says, "is labor-intensive and takes radiologists' time from what they are really there to do—treat the patient."

Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals then developed the plans for an RFID-enabled cabinet with Mobile Aspects, a maker of smart shelves for tracking stints or other high-value medical devices in hospitals. At the end of 2006, says Bryan Christianson, Mobile Aspects' VP of marketing, the companies began piloting the resulting technology—VistaTrak—at Florida Hospital in Orlando, and at Harper University Hospital in Detroit.

Pilots took place for about six months, Christianson says, at which time researchers conducted a proof-of-concept test and gained an understanding of which features would be the most useful for hospital staff. Mobile Aspects has since refined the system, he says, and now expects to gain U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) certification by July, after which VistaTrak will become commercially available.

Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals plans to provide passive 13.56 MHz RFID chips embedded in the bottle labels at its Berlin manufacturing site. Label maker Nosco creates the labels with UPM Raflatac RFID chips that comply with the ISO 15693 standard, and encodes the contrast agent's National Drug Code (NDC) on the chip. When packaging the product, Bayer attaches the label to a bottle and also encodes a lot number and expiration date on the label's chip. The tagged products will be known as Ultravist RF and Magnevist RF, and will be provided to hospitals that specifically request the RFID chips. Other customers will continue to receive bottles without RFID-enabled labels.

Hospitals can store the bottles in cabinets provided by Mobile Aspects—available either as a 6-foot-tall freestanding unit, or as a 3-foot tall model that can be mounted on a wall or sit on a shelf. Both models measure 3 feet in width and depth, and each comes with an embedded RFID interrogator, shelves for the bottles and a locking door.