Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is still moving through the expected cycle of education and deployment. The pharmaceutical industry is one of the very few sectors where one sees adoption at an item level occurring quite rapidly.
Healthcare and other allied life sciences sectors are expected to follow the trends observed in the pharmaceutical industry. The reason is that these industries are driven by the need for anti counterfeiting measures and patient safety enhancements and not just economics. This is good for the industry as it will drive scale, which in turn will drive down costs for all.
There are other areas of concern such as lack of standards and privacy concerns that need to be addressed for this industry to grow at a significant rate. Bar coding will continue to prevail in healthcare, making it important for players to develop solutions that cater both RFID and bar coding technologies. RFID technology is heading in a direction where it will supplement bar code rather than replace it in the immediate future.
There has been a considerable increase in the use of RFID for healthcare applications in the last five years owing to its higher adoption in hospitals and pharmaceutical drugs. RFID has seen a strong growth in areas such as tracking of drugs, patients and medical equipment areas, replacing the commonly used bar code technology till date.
The key applications for RFID in healthcare appear to be item level tagging of drugs along with real time locating systems (RTLS) for staff, patients and assets that can lead to improved efficiency and safety.
Application, analysis & trends
Some of the key industry trends observed in the RFID industry for healthcare applications are:
● The biggest use of RFID in healthcare in the next ten years will come from labelling of drugs at the item level and development of infrastructure and services needed to support this throughout the supply chain and hospitals
● The challenge is to prevent counterfeiting of drugs by establishing a complete history of each package at all times, known as pedigree
● A key application for RFID in healthcare is the use of RTLS for staff, patients, visitors and assets. However, in this scenario, the systems and support are costlier than tags (tags can be reused)
● Error prevention is one application that cuts across both item level drug tagging and RTLS and is one of the biggest uses of RFID. These solutions use an 'electronic handshake' to prevent any wrong procedure that might occur with an RFID system, recording the actual event for future references
RFID Vs. barcode
RFID has advantage over bar codes in terms of durability, improved accuracy and ability to be reused. But they lose out in terms of cost. However, RFID solutions will not act as a replacement to bar codes. In fact, both the technologies will coexist to create an effective solution.
High frequency (HF) has been a preferred choice for most of the system integrators and various drug companies as it is found to be more tolerable to metal and water with more predictable and controllable range, along with its ability to fit on small drug packages.
RFID's adoption has been considerably higher in hospitals, compared to other healthcare environments such as care homes and self-help. It is expected that there is going to be a good pick up for further applications of RFID in these places as well.
Growth drivers
Risk from litigation of healthcare providers and their desire to better utilise their assets will drive the implementation of RFID systems in general, and active RFID systems in particular. Medical institutions are expected to use state-of-the-art security, control and auditing technologies to protect their patients and prove adequate care is provided. This technology is also expected to be used by qualified healthcare institutions. Also, the technology will give a competitive advantage to healthcare organisations. The development of industry standards and regulations are expected to drive the adoption of RFID technology in healthcare.
Restraints
The key restraint faced by the RFID in healthcare are largely those of capital expenditure approvals by hospital and medical facilities and retailers in pharmacies as cost-prohibitive in an uncertain regulatory and privacy of data scenario. In case most of these are overcome by the understanding of what these tools - RFID and its related technologies, including software and hardware - are, it would provide enhanced patient care, increased facility efficiency, streamlined billing, asset location and security.
One of the key challenges faced by RFID industry is the cost prohibitive nature of tags and other associated hardware and unproven return on investment. Taken together with the required supply chain collaboration both upstream and down, RFID preclude the efficacy of the overall infrastructure. There are other perceived hurdles, which are to be met by all stakeholders. The use of RFID technologies in hospitals is limited till date, primarily due to the cost issues.
Even as RFID matures, it is likely that bar coding will continue to offer hospitals a proven, efficient and more cost effective means of capturing data for a variety of applications. Some of the applications are bedside medication administration, unit-dose labelling in pharmacy, specimen collection at the patient bedside, specimen tracking and management in the laboratory and materials management.
Courtesy: Technical Insight, Healthcare Practice, Frost & Sullivan