A group of Scandinavian companies is running a trial using radio frequency identification to track and authenticate individual bottles of drugs as they move through the supply chain. The project is being carried out in anticipation of tighter rules in the United States on the tracking of medications.
Stora Enso, a Helsinki-based paper packaging products company, is working with Finland’s Orion Pharma, the manufacturer of Marevan, an anticoagulant sold globally and used to prevent and treat blood clots. Meanwhile, Jaakkoo-Taara, a Finnish packaging manufacturer, is attaching UPM Raflatac 13.56 MHz RFID passive tags to the cartons of individual Marevan bottles. Stora Enso is using its PackAgent application (see Papermaker Works on Brand Authentication) to authenticate the cartons throughout the supply chain by verifying each tag’s serial number.
“For Orion Pharma, the trial is an opportunity to gather experience from the use of RFID technology in tracking deliveries and authenticating products in a commercial environment,” says Jukka Pietilä, Orion’s production manager for the project. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently reaffirmed its recommendation that RFID technology be used widely throughout the pharmaceutical industry by 2007 to improve security and safety (see FDA to Update Its RFID Vision).
Jaakkoo-Taara is affixing self-adhesive 13.56 MHz Raflatac Dipole tags, compliant with the ISO 15693 standard, to the interior bottom of the paper cartons. When Orion Pharma fills the bottles with pills at its production site, it encodes each tag with a unique serial number for the carton, as well as the batch number and the expiry date for the medicine.
Stora Enso would not disclose the number of bottles being tracked through the supply chain for the trial, but says the drug will be distributed to seven individual pharmacies in Finland and Estonia. The company expects to the tagged bottles will be sold to consumers by the end of April.
Orion is using PiccoLink handheld wireless RFID interrogators (readers) and Feig Electronic desktop interrogators, connected with cables, encode the tags at its factory. Once a batch of drugs is ready for shipment, individual items are packed in cases and an 868 MHz Raflatac Dipole passive UHF RFID tag is applied to each case, encoded with a unique ID number. Matching information about the contents of each case is kept in the PackAgent system.
Prior to shipping the cases from its facility, Orion reads the case tags to keep track of where each batch is going. At this (and subsequent) readings in the distribution chain, data is transferred to PackAgent software—either via a WLAN or a cable connection directly to a PackAgent server or by means of an Internet connection linked to such a server. PackAgent’s distributed IT architecture allows various parties in the trial to share information without including other unauthorized members of the supply chain.
When the cases arrive at the facilities of wholesaler Oriola, a portal reader from SAMSys Technologies reads the case tags. The data is then sent to the PackAgent software to authenticate the products and record their location. Oriola, an Orion Group subsidiary, distributes to pharmacies in Finland, with a separate subsidiary delivering the drug to locations in Estonia. For the purposes of this pilot program, cases for shipping were designed to hold the approximate amount of medicine required by each pharmacy, allowing Oriola to store the cases without unpacking them while awaiting the pharmacies’ orders. As each order comes in, Oriola pulls the requested quantity from storage, reading the case tags as the order leaves its facility.
The pharmacies unpack the individually packaged bottles from the cases, using a desktop RFID interrogator to read the HF tag attached to each bottle’s carton to make certain the correct package has been delivered to the right place. At the point of sale, the pharmacist reads the carton’s tag one last time to authenticate the drug.
For untagged drugs, Orion Pharma, Oriola and the dispensing pharmacies will continue to use bar-coded labels to track batches of medicine, Orion’s Pietilä says, but not individual items.
“We tried to make the pilot program as transparent as possible so we could see how it works with production and logistics processes,” says Kirsi Viskari, Stora Enso’s manager of smart packaging. “We’re having non-tagged and tagged packages of this particular medicine processed at the same time. What makes it unique in Europe is that it involves all the parties in the supply chain, and they are separate companies, including the package manufacturer.”
Stora Enso’s PackAgent application is part of the packaging solutions the company offers its customers. The software is compatible with other ID technologies besides RFID and can be used to provide consumers an easy way to authenticate products over the Internet. That service, which is not being tested in this pilot program, entails a consumer entering a drug’s serial number at a Web site to receive confirmation of the drug’s authenticity.