RFID Tracking for Medications Aimed at Remote Hospital Locations

Published: January 17, 2025
  • Bluesight has released its solution known as KitCheck Anywhere that consists of retrofitted RFID reading shelves that can be used in ORs or patient rooms.
  • The solution is being piloted by a U.S. hospital to track refrigerated medications stocked in a cardiac unit, thereby preventing out of stocks, and ensuring products don’t expire before they’re used.

Some drug compounders and pharmaceutical companies have been applying UHF RFID inlays to products destined for hospitals to ease the inventory management efforts and ensure product is used before it expires. A solution to capture those tag IDs at the hospital pharmacy comes from Bluesight known as KitCheck, consisting of readers and a software platform to help identify goods as they are stored and administered to patients.

For the past six months a hospital has been testing a new version of the solution—known as KitCheck Anywhere—that takes the visibility of medication from the actual pharmacy out into other areas of the hospital such as surgical theaters, patients’ rooms and clean rooms. That opens a new window into where inventory is, its storage and usage, company officials said.

According to said TJ Bozada, Bluesight’s product manager, KitCheck Anywhere is designed to be a retrofit solution for a hospital’s existing shelves, coolers or containers—whether refrigeration units in the administration area central to operating rooms (OR) or a cabinet in a patient’s room. It consists of retrofittable RFID shelf-liners can be detecting the presence of RFID tagged products. The reader then forwards the read data to the system’s cloud-based software.

Expanding Beyond the Hospital Pharmacy

Bluesight’s products are already in use in more than 2,200 hospitals for medication management, diversion surveillance and purchasing optimization. The tagged drugs are identified when received and can then be tracked digitally to ensure they are available for use, and delivered to patients before they expire. However, there are still limits in knowing what happens to the drugs when they leave the pharmacy.

The goal of KitCheck Anywhere is to increase medication tracking visibility into more areas of a hospital, including satellite pharmacies or in OR suites or infusion centers or surgical centers that are not attached to the main campus.

“Now you have a remote visibility into the inventory that you have in those locations in real time,” Bozada said.

As drugs are stocked into inventory, the tag ID is captured and the reader forwards that data for the unit.

Pilot Underway Since June

The first technology pilot began in June 2024 at a hospital that has 450 beds and 20 ORs. The facility is part of a12-hospital network.

The hospital already used KitCheck so the KitCheck Anywhere feature acts as an additional module that can be viewed within the company’s existing software. Users log into the software and view data related to medications that have been entered into the system, based on the unique ID number encoded on the UHF RFID label, linked to details about that medication and its expiration.

The hospital’s pilot consisted of a single refrigerator in a cardiac OR suite. It is intended to supplement or replace a time consuming, and error prone manual stocking effort. The OR suite requires a 15 minute walk from the central pharmacy, a journey that includes an elevator ride. So for staff to manually track inventory at the OR, the task is time consuming, but critical.

Maintaining Stock Levels

Bozada offered an example that illustrates the stocking challenge when it comes to high value, and highly critical medications. If the container should store ten units of a specific compound drug used in the OR, the goal is to maintain that inventory count. If someone brought five units to replace those that were estimated to already be used, they may find that there are only two units still available onsite. So they restock with the additional five, leaving the container with only seven units of that critical, and time- and temperature-sensitive inventory.

At that point, the individual must make a decision: walk all the way back to the pharmacy and return with three more units, or wait until the next stocking event, which could be risky.

If all products are consumed, a procedure might be delayed while awaiting the proper medication. That’s a healthcare concern, first and foremost, Bozada said. But it also affects revenue if surgical procedures are delayed and that high cost OR site can accommodate one less procedure on a given day.

Reducing Need for Overstocking

Some hospitals choose to store additional inventory levels, to prevent the risk of stockouts. Many drugs can have a very short shelf life of seven to 14 days. If they are not used in within that time period, they may have to be discarded.

Some of these medications can be costly. The hospital piloting the technology indicated they had to discard $70,000 worth of expired medications per year, from the single refrigerator.

With the pilot said Bozada, “Our goal was first and foremost: zero stock outs with patient safety first, our second goal was to bring down that rate of expiration of drugs before they can be used.”

Since June, they have had zero stock-outs and zero delayed procedures. Bozada added “and within the first month we’ve reduced the rate at which they were expiring by 85 percent.” Most recently that rate has leveled to about 70 percent decrease in expirations.

Working with Refrigeration Manufacturers

Bluesight has been in conversation with some refrigerator manufacturers that could offer the KitCheck Anywhere retrofit within their units, linking the RFID data about drugs stored inside these units, with the refrigerator’s own temperature measurements, as well as tracking how long the drugs were out of the required safe temperature.

Refrigeration is not the only application for the Anywhere feature, however, said Bozada. Initially Bluesight has focused on refrigerated inventory because that’s the primary challenge the customer hospital wanted to overcome. That said, the other big uses are diversion of non-controlled high value products such as Botox, insulin, inhalers, Ozempic or Wegovy, and HIV medications. And lastly, the system provides the ability for a remote view of inventory that is not temperature sensitive.

The value of installing KitCheck Anywhere in other sites such as a clean room could enhance the benefits, the company said. To visually inspect inventory levels, traditionally workers might have had to put on clean-suit gear, as well as potentially enter sensitive or hazardous areas. With the Anywhere feature, said Bozada, “the pharmacists are able to see, in real time, what inventory they have while in their street clothes, and without introducing themselves to the health hazards.”

Since the first pilot launched, it has expanded to include an oncology refrigerator in a hazardous sterile compounding room in October.

Early customers are interested in adding the Anywhere function to their existing KitCheck solution. However, Bozada added, “there’s been great interest from folks who are not KitCheck customers today, and there is no requirement for someone to be already a customer, to use KitCheck Anywhere.”

Learn More: