The healthcare industry is becoming one of the fastest-growing markets for the radio frequency identification (RFID) application. According to an estimate, this application is going to be worth $4.9 billion by the year 2022. RFID technology promises value and efficiency to healthcare organizations and safety to the patients. The best thing about RFID technology is that it helps medical labs and hospitals to become smarter. With this technology, they can track blood samples and pallets loaded with packaged medications. They can view inventory in real-time. They can monitor the temperature of the heat-sensitive drugs throughout the supply chain process. In simple words, RFID allows healthcare organizations and hospitals to have better visibility of the products they dispatch or receive. Smart Labeling in Hospitals Hospitals can benefit from RFID labeling to manage tasks such as the movement of samples from patients, and the provision of medications to respective patients. With every hospital implementing the RFID system, it becomes much convenient for multiple hospitals and medical labs to form a smart network. It can help the healthcare industry to encourage effective collaboration among hospitals and healthcare organizations. Authentication of Pharmaceuticals and Samples According to a survey, about 200,000 patients die in hospitals due to medical errors. These errors can be prevented with the help of the RFID, which can help hospitals to bring accuracy in their processes. With the help of smart labeling, the process of tracking and tracing pharmaceuticals and blood samples becomes adequately automated and essentially error-free. It helps the hospital management to make sure that every patient receives the right diagnosis and the right medication. Each RFID tag comes with a unique identification number. Manufacturers assign this identification number to the product that receives that RFID tag. An RFID reader reads those tags very quickly to show information about the product. A typical RFID reader can read 700 tags in a second. Deploying RFID The use of smart labeling in the healthcare and pharmaceutical applications is at its infancy at the moment, but the RFID itself is a mature technology. It means that it is entirely up to the healthcare organizations and hospitals how they use this technology to increase accuracy, improve efficiency, and reduce costs. It would be worth mentioning here that the implementation of smart labeling based on RFID tags is not going to involve RFID tags only. There is a complex system based on hardware and software that has to remain active to make this RFID system to work. It could be a hefty investment for sure, but it is well worth the benefits that the healthcare industry needs at the moment.
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Wilford Giron
I write blogs about packaging and supply chain! ArchivesCategories |