RFID Provides Mission-Critical Monitoring for Health-Care Research

Northwestern University’s Center for Comparative Medicine (CCM) is a service and teaching unit that supports all animal use in research, testing and education. With a large population of animals and $300 million in ongoing biomedical research projects, CCM needed a way to ensure that the animals were receiving the best possible care, while also protecting the integrity of the research being conducted. CCM is currently installing radio frequency identification technology within its facility. To date, more than 20 animal rooms have been RFID-enabled with more than 12,000 tagged animal cages. The deployment is continuing with the goal of enabling 145 animal rooms with RFID. With this planned system, CCM expects to track the locations of animal cages throughout its facility, thus eliminating the error-prone manual labor associated with bar-code censuses, and increasing census accuracy. This presentation will outline the expected benefits of decreased staff requirements, a lowered risk of contamination, improved animal welfare and safeguarded funding, establishing a new standard of animal care at research facilities.