RFID technology helps the pharmaceutical and medical device industries to upgrade to digital intelligence

With the advancement and development of science and technology, the application of RFID technology in the healthcare market is growing at a significant rate worldwide. It is expected that the compound annual growth rate of this field will reach about 9.5% by 2031. Among many industries, the pharmaceutical industry can maintain such a growth rate due to its uniqueness, and RFID technology plays a vital role in it.

From the observed trends, the development trend of the healthcare industry is generally perceptible. With the rise of medical costs, the aging population and the intensification of labor shortages, the introduction of new technologies has become particularly urgent. These new technologies require not only talents with technical expertise, but also professionals who understand programming and supply chain management. Patients have increasing expectations for medical services. They hope to reduce waiting time in queues, register and pay directly through medical insurance cards, and even view their test results online without paperwork. These demands have driven medical services to develop in the direction of higher quality.

In the field of pharmaceuticals or medical devices, supply chain visibility, process automation, channel protection and product verification are crucial in the entire cycle of products from production to market circulation. Once the product is produced, the first thing to face is how to improve the transparency of the supply chain. Next is process automation, ensuring that product channels are protected in the supply chain and verifying the flow of products from production to the final Hospital or consumer. Outside the distributor system, it is often difficult to grasp whether the product is consumed, whether it is backlogged in the channel, and whether it puts pressure on suppliers. In addition, whether the agent can support the further expansion of the business and whether the actual consumption of the product meets the sales forecast are all issues that need attention.

RFID technology plays a supporting role in this process. It can help collect key data and support decision-making. From supply chain to anti-counterfeiting, to production and branding, the application of technology helps to improve efficiency and transparency. On the consumer side, technology can provide fast mobile phone authentication services to ensure that consumers can verify the authenticity of the purchased drugs and medical devices. This is especially important for unofficial self-operated but authorized channels, which helps to improve consumer compliance and trust.

In chronic disease management, the consistency of patients' actual medication and drug design effects, as well as how to collect patient data, are all issues of concern to pharmaceutical companies. Systems and RFID technology can help complete the data loop, verify the effectiveness of the drug recommendation dosage model, and analyze patient usage. The advantages of RFID technology in the healthcare sector are mainly reflected in the following four aspects:

Provide fast visibility

RFID technology can quickly provide identification of a large number of items and achieve real-time inventory visibility. For example, brands such as Adidas and Nike choose to use this technology to cope with their huge inventory needs and supply chain management.

Authentication and anti-counterfeiting

RFID chips are encrypted and difficult to copy, thus providing an effective anti-counterfeiting method.

Improve patient safety

Patients can use their own mobile phones, whether Android or Apple systems, to quickly verify the authenticity of products, thereby ensuring patient safety.

Achieve single-item tracking

RFID technology allows the traceability of individual drug flows, which is particularly important for drug flow traceability.

These technologies have a wide range of applications, from life sciences to pharmaceuticals, health care and other fields. RFID can help identify people and objects, track product flows, interact with consumers, and provide new business models. Although time is limited and we cannot expand one by one, it is certain that these technical solutions are already quite mature and provide strong technical support for the development of the industry.

Trends observed from the perspective of the supply chain cover sustainable development, automation, improvement of data collection efficiency, cross-border management, data traceability, and cost control. These principles are generally applicable to all industries, because once items are moved, they will inevitably face these problems. In supply chain management, issues such as timeliness of delivery, labor costs, warehouse loading rates, and route optimization all rely on data collection technology to make decisions. "Only through observation can effective management be carried out", this is the golden rule of supply chain management. RFID technology can provide key visibility, allowing managers to gain insight into problems and manage them effectively.

RFID medical device digital supply chain is to apply RFID technology to the UDI full-process traceability management solution. Through RFID reading and writing equipment, the product circulation information of each link of the production enterprise, circulation enterprise, and medical terminal can be automatically obtained in real time to realize the digitization and automation of medical device supply chain management.

Through the application of RFID technology, it can effectively solve the problems of low scanning efficiency, slow delivery speed, cumbersome data verification, and unrecognizable labels. It allows warehouse managers to quickly identify product information in full boxes/batches, synchronize in real time, and automatically verify data, efficiently realize in and out of the warehouse and inventory, solve the problem of consignment inventory management, speed up the confirmation of consumption data, promote the upstream and downstream of the supply chain to achieve full-chain data collaborative sharing, and realize the digital transformation and upgrading of the supply chain.

Through the construction of a digital supply chain system based on RFID technology, the supply chain from manufacturers, distribution companies to terminal medical institutions is truly seamlessly connected, and the upstream and downstream of the supply chain are promoted to achieve full-chain data collaborative sharing, and transparent information such as manufacturer inventory data, distributor inventory data, and terminal medical institution inventory data is realized. Intercommunication, breaking data silos, effectively improving the coordination of the supply chain, while promoting the reduction of the overall logistics costs of the industry, and improving the digital management level of the supply chain.