Pharmaceutical Track and Trace in 2008: An Exploding Market for RFID, or the Next Big Disappointment?

Tracking pharmaceuticals through the supply/distribution chain in the United States could be a "killer app" for RFID. The upside seems compelling, extending beyond the usual supply chain benefits such as lower costs, reduced out-of-stocks, and diversion detection to powerful (if hard to quantify in dollars) benefits such as patient safety and improved clinical outcomes. Years of effort by pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors, IT experts, and RFID specialists have delivered technology, such as hardware and software, which implement the EPCglobal family of standards that overcomes most of the obstacles to this cross-enterprise, open-loop solution. Government has weighed in with legislation at the federal level and in more than a dozen states, with legislation under consideration in many others states. All this legislation established requirements and deadlines for closely tracking the distribution of prescription drugs. In a word, it established “mandates.” With tracking required for tens of millions of items at thousands of wholesale and retail locations, this may seem the right time for this market to explode.

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