In an effort to increase customer loyalty, Azienda Speciale Multiservizi (ASM) Venaria, a pharmacy chain in northwestern Italy, is offering an RFID-enabled card that allows its customers to create a health diary and track prescription purchases. After six months of piloting the system at a few of its stores, the company is now expanding its use to all 17 locations in the province of Turin.
In the future, customers can expect to use the cards for other services, such as redeeming coupons and discounts. ASM Venaria—owned by the city of Venaria Reale—is responsible not only for the pharmacies, but two other city services as well: cafeterias for Venaria’s primary and secondary schools, and public transportation. Eventually, the ASM Card will also be employed by local students for cafeteria payments, as well as by children and adults for transportation on local buses.
For now, however, the company is operating the system only at its pharmacies. Five thousand customers have been using the card since May 2009, and based on the trial’s success, the system will now be expanded to thousands more, enabling those customers to store and track data regarding the health services they receive at the pharmacy.
At ASM Venaria, and at all other Italian pharmacies, customers can not only fill prescriptions written by their physicians, and buy other personal or household items, they can also receive diagnostic and other basic health-care procedures, such as glucose, uric acid, cholesterol and blood-pressure tests, administered by a pharmacist or other clinical staff member. What’s more, as a result of those procedures, Italian pharmacies can assist customers by booking medical examinations or clinical tests at public hospitals.
In 2007, ASM Venaria first began considering options to entice its customers to continue utilizing ASM’s services exclusively for their health-care screening needs, says Mario Corrado, the company’s director. The store considered a loyalty program based on discounts and rewards, but management felt that option seemed too much like a retail offering. In addition, Italian law prohibits promotions for medications, though it does allow promotions on non-medicinal items, such as toothbrushes and shampoos. ASM Venaria decided to develop an idea that was more than just a loyalty card—one that could also be used for health-care services. The result was the ASM Card, which contains a passive 13.56 MHz RFID tag compliant with the ISO 14443 standard.
Without the card, customers must track the records of their blood, blood pressure or other screening tests themselves, and the tests could be performed at any area drug store. With the ASM Card, however, customers have an incentive to continue returning to ASM Venaria stores for their medical procedures, as well as purchases, since a record of each visit can be stored on their card, or in a server accessible on the Internet. In addition, customers can provide the records to their physicians, and can also print the records and provide them to the government for tax purposes, or to insurance companies.
Individuals can sign up for the card on ASM Venaria’s Web site, or at one of the company’s stores. They can select whether their information will be stored on the server, which they can then access via a password and personal identification number, or whether the encrypted data will be stored only on the card tag’s 2 kilobytes of memory. In the latter case, a person could still use the card to access discounts, as well as his or her health diary data, at any of the 17 ASM Venaria stores, and store the diary information directly on the tag, not on the server. If the data were stored only on the tag, however, that information could not be recovered in the event that a customer were to lose the card.
At the pharmacy, when paying for a diagnostic check, a customer taps the ASM Card near a FEIG Electronic OBID Classic-Pro RFID interrogator, which reads the ID number of the card’s tag, as well as any other information stored on it. The readers—installed by systems integrator H&S Custom and supplied by Softwork (FEIG’s Italian distribution partner)—send the data to ASM Venaria’s server over an Ethernet connection. The server utilizes Farmaconsult software to manage the data (such as purchases or test results) resulting from the user’s visit. That information is also written to the card’s tag. The pharmacy staff can then input data related to that procedure, and link it to the ID number on the tag that was read.
Every customer can receive his or her personal health diary in any of the chain’s stores, simply by tapping the card next to a pharmacy reader.
By January 2010, ASM Venaria plans to extend the services on the ASM Card to enable customers to load funds on an electronic wallet on the card, in order to pay for products or services at the company’s stores. In addition, cardholders will be able to earn rewards for recycling plastic bottles, by accumulating points on the card for each bottle returned to the stores for recycling. The points can then be used for discounts when paying for goods at ASM Venaria.
The electronic wallet, which can store up to €30 ($45), will let cardholders pay for products at the pharmacy, as well as for school meals and public transit fare. ASM Venaria hopes to distribute 30,000 cards during the next two years, to be used for these purposes. To that end, RFID interrogators have already been installed in the city’s school cafeterias, and on its buses.
Because the tags and readers comply with Near Field Communication (NFC) RFID specifications, a customer will also be able to use his or her own NFC-enabled mobile phone to serve as an ASM Card. NFC-enabled phones are expected to be sold in greater quantities within the next few years.
“The initial introduction of the card was not easy for the diagnostic component,” Corrado says, noting that middle-aged and elderly customers were initially suspicious of the technology. However, he adds, those participating in the pilot became comfortable with the system and saw benefits in tracking their health-care history, “and having all the purchases listed in a report at the end of the year for budget, tax or insurance purposes.”
Currently, approximately only 30 percent of ASM Card holders utilize the Web component. “We expect that it will grow in the future,” Corrado states, as more participants become accustomed to accessing information over the Internet.