EU Amendment to Medicines Law Favors RFID Technology
Zebra Technologies (NASDAQ: ZBRA), an innovator at the front line of business with solutions and partners that deliver a performance edge is seeing enormous growth in orders from the healthcare sector in 2022.
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New Regulations on Drug Visibility
Under the EU's Medical Device Regulation (MDR), drug manufacturers must have accurate and complete data on the condition and whereabouts of their products since November 2021. Accordingly, each product has a unique product identification number, called UDI, which makes product locations more visible and guarantees traceability. RFID technology and solutions from Zebra Technologies make it easy to achieve this goal. "Our RFID tags can be attached to the pallets, cartons and even the individual packages," explains Daniel Dombach, Director EMEA Industry Solutions at Zebra.
"If a shipment is driven from Germany to Belgium, for example, then the shipment could pass through an RFID gate at the point of arrival, all tags would be recorded, and the manufacturer would know immediately whether the complete shipment had arrived."
Optimized Demand Planning with RFID
The use of RFID makes production workflows more efficient and improves tracking of pharmaceuticals. Theft and tampering are reduced, and patients receive more transparent information about a drug's shelf life and therefore quality. When this process works across hundreds of warehouses and distribution centers, demand planning and production control can be optimized. After all, the biggest challenge for pharmaceutical executives, according to the "Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Vision Study", a study conducted by Zebra in 2021, is manufacturing and delivering enough drugs to meet demand.
RFID Holds Major Advantages Over Barcodes
The traditional solution for identifying drugs and medical devices in boxes in warehouses had been bar codes. However, the visibility of bar codes is too low. In addition, human interaction is required to read the bar codes. RFID, on the other hand, has the advantage that the tags can be read automatically and at any time. Larger quantities of goods can be recorded in an RFID tunnel or gate, and mobile devices barely larger than a smartphone can be used to search specifically for individual products.
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For this reason, RFID has long been a first-class solution in the logistics and retail sectors. In healthcare and the pharmaceutical industry, it is becoming increasingly established, because it is the only way to comply with the MDR specifications.
