Drug Distributor, Tech Firm Aim to Ease RFID Adoption for Healthcare

Published: October 1, 2024
  • Drug wholesaler Cencora is tagging the injectable anesthesia it sends to hospitals so that the products can be automatically managed with the Intelliguard RFID solution, as they are received and used.
  • The effort is intended to bypass previous obstacles around RFID deployment for pharmaceuticals, by offering customers products that are already tagged.

Even though RFID technology offers benefits for the pharmaceutical and healthcare markets, adoption has been limited. The technology hasn’t been widely deployed yet, despite the fact that RFID tags on equipment and drugs help users with authentication, gaining expiration or recall alerts, and ensuring proper administration to patients.

Some challenges have been based on standardization of RFID data, and the mechanics of rolling out the many thousands of potential tags, in addition to adoption of readers at healthcare sites to read those tags.

Pharmaceutical companies are not yet building RFID tags into the majority of their products, and while hospitals might benefit from the system, their highly trained healthcare staff don’t have time to apply those tags themselves.

Cencora (formerly known as AmerisourceBergen) is looking to change that, partnering with technology company Intelliguard to help resolve the problem by tagging their injectable drugs for anesthesia in surgical units. This would allow customers—using Intelliguard’s RFID solutions—to receive drugs already tagged and automatically detect each syringe as it is placed in stations or carts, and then administered to patients.

The companies refer to the practice of applying tags by the distributor as “pre-tagging” rather than “source tagging,” (which would refer to tag application at the point of manufacture.)

Kick-starting RFID Use for Pharmaceutical Management

Cencora handles approximately 30 percent of all pharmaceuticals sold and distributed in the U.S. As a major player in the pharmaceutical supply business, the company has been investigating, testing and developing RFID systems for more than a decade. The benefits of a more visible product would not only be felt by the hospitals but by Cencora itself—the company could better know when and how its products are used, and when they need to be replenished.

Recently, the partnership with Intelliguard to apply tags to its injectable anesthesia products came about to help kick-start RFID technology use and the benefits related to it, said Dustin Roller, Cencora’s VP of innovation, technology and global products and solutions.

Roller pointed out that for each hospital, even if they could benefit from automated data about their drug products, don’t have workers onsite to apply tags as they are received.

“It’s not a warehouse, it’s not a distribution operation, it’s a healthcare operation,” he said, which means those tagging the products would be skilled healthcare practitioners rather than warehouse operators.

“Frankly we were just getting impatient— if we’re going to get this thing going and we’re going to get it going today, the only way it’s going to happen is if the wholesalers start to apply these tags,” Roller said. “It’s not the ideal solution,” he added, but it will serve as an intermediary fix to the management of high value, critical medications.

How Intelliguard RFID Solutions Work

Intelliguard’s Mira Prep and Mira Care stations are already in use by several hospitals. The Mira Prep stations read RFID tags as products or trays are placed in the enclosure, so pharmacists can view the identity, expiration and other details about the products, thereby reducing tray preparation and restock time.

Instead of manually scanning medications, pharmacists can automatically log and track medications and efficiently assemble trays with greater than 99 percent accuracy, said Tim Tinnel, Intelliguard’s executive VP and chief operating officer.

The Mira Care Station is a medication-dispensing workstation for anesthesia providers that provides real-time data, clinical workflow, and tracking of controlled substances. When a tagged item is removed, that action is detected by the Mira Ecosystem software and can be linked to the provider who removed the medication as well as the patient who will be receiving the medication.

The software can generate reports so that both hospitals and the drug company can view when replenishments are needed.

Cencora Has Been Testing RFID for Years

Cencora is among companies already experimenting with RFID technology and its applications.

“A lot of great innovation has entered the space over the years with people coming up with really cool ideas and technologies to solve problems in healthcare that would benefit from RAIN [UHF] RFID,” said Roller. “But it all starts with putting those tags on that product and making that product visible in a meaningful way—and that has been a vexing problem for years and years.”

The company is now applying tags to the injectable products before they are shipped to customers, if the receiving hospital requests that technology.

Thus far Cencora is one of the few medication distributors offering RFID-enabled products, which serves as a competitive advantage for the company. “That service gives us some intrinsic value because we have a uniqueness amongst our competitors,” said Roller.

Cencora charges customers for the service but it does not see the service as a large revenue generator. It could, however, attract more business from companies that seek to have RFID-enabled injectables among their inventories.

The RFID-based traceability of drugs has the potential to help companies comply with the FDA’s Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA), since it enables the capability to track the drug all the way to the patient.  For those administering the drugs, said Tinnel, “it creates that ease and comfort, plus it further reduces medication errors.”

Learning from the Challenges of COVID

The healthcare industry learned a hard lesson during the supply chain issues that resulted around the COVID-19 pandemic.  Not only did product delivery get delayed, but there was a rise in black market goods.

Manually tracking each product by anesthesiologists has been time consuming and frustrating as well, said Tinnel.

With the Intelliguard system, the same anesthesiologist can simply remove a medication from the tray, and the software automatically knows what was removed, providing them with the confidence to focus on their patient rather than checking and double-checking drug labels.

Open Standards

Intelliguard provides an open standards solution and works closely with standards organizations GS1 and RAIN Alliance. So Intelliguard’s solution falls within the standards framework and operates with off-the-shelf tags from most vendors.

“We want to be very agnostic we don’t want to be in the tag selling business,” said Tinnel. The company works with the Axia Institute and other laboratories to test and certify tags that are used with its system.

Fom Cencora’s perspective “we share this goal of this interoperability to enhance the availability of RFID,” said Roller.

He added the drug wholesaler itself initially researched RFID systems that were proprietary,  but then opted to adopt a universally standard approach to tag encoding that would enable other technology companies, and other drug companies, to share access.

“For us all to be successful, and for us to have the kind of impact on the market that we’re looking for— that everyone’s really shooting for— we have to take down these walls that keep us from collaborating with one another,” said Roller.

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About the Author: Claire Swedberg