Embedded RFID: Transforming The Management Of Medical Devices & Supplies

By SkyeTek, Inc.

RFID is not just for supply chain applications anymore. Significant investment has gone into making the technology practical, cost-efficient, and easy-to-use, especially in embedded applications. As this paper will detail, embedded RFID has become a game-changing technology that medical manufacturers and healthcare providers are using to satisfy some of their most pressing needs.

Today's Challenges: Medical manufacturers continually face a conflicting set of challenges - increase safety and revenue while decreasing costs. Challenges include:

• Inventory Visibility– Making sure that healthcare providers have the right products at the right place at the right time and avoiding overstocking, spoilage and shrinkage.
• Disposables Counterfeiting – Protecting authentic disposables against counterfeits and the resulting threats to diagnosis/treatment reliability & eroded recurring revenues.
• Patient Safety – Continually improving the quality of patient care through better process reliability and proper device configuration to drive brand equity, increased revenue, and minimize legal liability.

Medical and healthcare industries are constantly seeking new ways to improve diagnosis reliability, treatment success, regulatory compliance, and cost efficiency, especially in areas that historically have been governed by manual processes. Medication errors, for example, rank among the most common medical errors and harm at least 1.5 million people every year resulting in approximately 7,000 fatalities. The extra hospital-related costs of treating these injuries, moreover, conservatively amount to $3.5 billion a year.