John Burnell of RFID Update reports that the “UK standards organization GS1 UK released preliminary results of a pilot project that used RFID, bar codes, the EPCIS data exchange system and a variety of international identification standards to successfully track drugs from international manufacturing facilities to a London hospital. The pilot tracked 15 different medicines, 50,000 individually identified drug packages plus their cases and pallets from manufacturers in Ireland and the Netherlands through distributors and wholesalers to receipt at Barts hospital, where they were packed into totes for tracking in the facility.
“It was all done with real medicine going to real patients,” project coordinator John Jenkins told RFID Update. “The bottom-line message is the technologies are ready for deployment. We demonstrated their ability to perform in real-world conditions.”
A major focus was to validate the ability of the EPCIS data sharing standard and communication system to provide visibility to users throughout the supply chain. All pilot participants, which included approximately 15 pharmaceutical manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, logistics providers, technology firms, standards bodies and Barts hospital, could access the EPCIS database. “We knew where products were at any given time, so we could effect a recall almost instantly if required,” Jenkins said. “It wasn’t all easy, and I don’t want to give that impression.”
Bar code and/or RFID reads were taken to track drugs when they left their manufacturing facility, upon entry and exit at distributors, at entry to the wholesaler, when wholesalers repacked case and pallet content into totes to be placed into inventory, when assembled orders were shipped from the wholesaler, and when received at the hospital. Multiple GS1 identification standards were used for package labels, tote boxes, returnable assets, shipping labels and transport vehicles. GPS tracking was used to supplement the system to monitor shipments from the Netherlands.
Some participants used camera phones with bar code decoding software to scan Data Matrix labels. “What that shows is the reading technology needed for traceability systems is very simple, and can be low cost,” Jenkins said.
The pilot started in 2006, when GS1 UK first began recruiting participants, and will officially conclude this June. Jenkins is preparing final reports about the pilot for the European Commission, which sponsored the effort as part of its BRIDGE (Building Radio Frequency Identification for the Global Environment) project to fund and research RFID activity. More details about the pilot and a list of participants are included in the GS1 UK announcement.”
This pilot has shown that along with RFID, other wireless technologies like GPS and Mobile can be combined effectively to create a solution that addresses the needs of a huge industry like pharmaceuticals, especially when they use EPCIS and other industry standards to seamlessly share data among the various constituents. At Ennovasys, we believe in mixing and matching the right set of technologies to provide solutions that effectively address various types of business problems, with the overall goal of all-time and real-time assets visibility across the enterprise.
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