RFID management application in pharmaceutical supply chain

Medicine is a special commodity that is closely related to people's life and health, so it occupies an important position in the daily life of social groups. The quality and safety of drugs is crucial to the health and life safety of social groups. Once the drug supply chain system fails, it will have extremely negative effects and even hinder the development of pharmaceutical companies.

Therefore, it is of great significance to strengthen drug supply chain management, which can reduce the probability of inferior drugs to the greatest extent and improve the safety of drug circulation. At the same time, strengthening the supervision of drug regulatory authorities is also an important means to ensure drug quality and safety.

A large number of errors in prescribing, dispensing and taking medications occur every year in the medical field, resulting in numerous medical errors, lost work time and legal proceedings.

According to statistics, the annual losses caused by these aspects are as high as 75 billion US dollars. Improved drug tracking methods may help Hospitals save money and curb the proliferation of counterfeit and substandard drugs, which currently account for 10% of the global drug market.

At present, the supply chain management of pharmaceutical products in the medical field mainly uses barcoding technology. Although barcoding technology is quite mature and has been widely used around the world, it also has some insurmountable shortcomings:

The same barcode encoding can only be defined as one type of product in management, and individual products within the same type of products cannot be identified.

Barcodes must be operated visually. Only one barcode can be recognized at a time. It cannot penetrate transparent or non-metallic materials such as wood, paper, and plastic. It must be recognized at close range without object obstacles. It is very efficient when batch operations are required. Low.

Barcodes must be attached to paper, so they are easily damaged or contaminated, making identification difficult or impossible.

Since barcode storage information is limited, once the barcode is printed, it cannot be changed.

Barcodes are easy to forge and cannot be used as a basis for anti-counterfeiting and traceability.

In the pharmaceutical supply chain, RFID technology can be used in all aspects of pharmaceutical production, circulation, and sales. For example, RFID technology can be used for batch management, inventory management, flow tracking, expiration warning, etc. of medicines.

Specifically, RFID tags are placed on drugs and related items, and UHF RFID technology can be used to monitor the entire process from pharmaceutical factories to sellers and to end users.

For pharmaceutical factories, UHF RFID technology can help them know in time where their drugs are sold; for patients, UHF RFID technology can help them know in time the production date, manufacturer, and expiration date of the drugs in their hands.

So, what kind of work benefits can RFID technology bring to users?

Efficiency: RFID technology can realize real-time monitoring of drugs, eliminating the time and labor costs of manual inventory.

Accuracy: RFID technology can achieve accurate location and tracking of medicines.

Security: RFID technology can prevent theft and the breeding of counterfeit and shoddy products.

Universality: RFID technology can be applied to various types of drugs, including but not limited to prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs, etc.