Cardinal Health claims that this process will add an additional layer of security to lessen the chance of counterfeit pharmaceuticals entering the supply chain, and may improve efficiency with analysis of data to identify bottlenecks, for example.
Cardinal Health is the first company in healthcare to comprehensively test RFID technology at the unit level in a real-time setting, beginning with product labeling and packaging, and then as it travels through the distribution center to when it is received by a customer, said Renard Jackson, executive vice president of packaging services for Cardinal Health.
As part of the pilot, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags will be placed on the labels of brand-name and generic solid-dose prescription drugs at the company’s Printed Components facility in Moorestown, N.J. At the Philadelphia branch the electronic product code (EPC) will then be encoded during the packaging process.
The products will then be shipped to a Cardinal Health distribution center in Findlay, Ohio, where the data will be read and authenticated, then shipped to health-care providers for further testing of read rates and data flow. The drugs used in the pilot will not be dispensed to patients.
