RFID and Barcoding Convergence in the Pharmaceutical Value Chain...

The U.S Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published rules in 2004 that require prescription drugs to be identified with barcode labels at the unit-of-use packaging level to drive improvements in patient safety through reduction of preventable medical errors. This capability must be demonstrated by April 2006. An FDA task force released a study on security labeling techniques to protect against pharmaceutical counterfeiting, which leverages implementation of radio frequency identification (RFID) in the pharmaceutical supply chain by 2007. Most pharmaceutical companies and their distributors need an RFID strategy because of RFID compliance requirements by participants in the pharmaceutical value chain, such as major retailers: Wal-Mart, Target, and the U.S. Department of Defense.

RFID compliance requirements in the pharmaceutical value start as early as 2005 and will intensify due to these regulatory and value chain trends.

All of this market activity requires pharmaceutical companies to define an RFID-enabled product labeling and packaging strategy, that can be flexibly implemented and leveraged over the over the next five years... The RFID strategy must address specific RFID pallet and container tagging requirements, unit-of-use bar coding labeling requirements, anti-counterfeiting RFID and smart label marking, and RFID-enabled brand protection. The RFID technology strategy must deliver the required business capabilities, but also should provide tangible benefits in security and operational efficiency of the supply chain for the participants in the pharmaceutical value chain.