RFID Solutions Attract Attention for Medication Inventory Management

Using radio frequency identification (RFID) systems to track hospital and health system assets, including equipment and staff, have long been in use. But it appears that more organizations are giving RFID a second look to aid in medication management accuracy, safety and efficiency.

Recent reports note that UF Health Shands, a private, not-for-profit hospital in Gainesville, Florida, has been using an RFID solution for three years to help the pharmacy team manage crash cart trays. Meanwhile, Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston has been using RFID solutions for drug kits, trays and airway boxes for several years to streamline the refilling process.

RFID systems augment and improve a historically barcode-driven workflow by utilizing the technology’s power to read large numbers of drugs during a single scan — in real time, wirelessly. This can make it is easier and faster to determine what drugs may need to be restocked or removed due to expiration. RFID also can eliminate manual entry of lot numbers and expiration dates while accelerating the recall process, which saves many hours of often tedious work, advocates say.

Still, making the conversion to RFID tracking of medications has its own set of labor-intensive considerations.

Evaluate Tagging Considerations

To use RFID-enabled medication systems, each medication needs to be RFID tagged, notes a Pharmaceutical Commerce report. This typically requires pharmacy personnel to place a vendor-provided RFID tag onto individual products, associate the drug information to the tag and then double-check the tags to ensure accuracy.

Tag placement also can be important since the tags must be affixed in the right location to avoid obscuring the medication label. Many hospitals have job aids to direct pharmacy personnel where and how to affix tags, especially on difficult-to-read products.

While it may be a lot of work, for many facilities the benefits in terms of accuracy and efficiency outweigh this tedious task. For others, however, the labor required to tag the number of products required may dissuade them from adopting RFID.

UF Health Shands opted in favor of an RFID solution to support its emergency department, pharmacy and hospital-at-home program that launched in 2024. Rubaiyat Zinat, pharmacist coordinator for adult medicine pharmacy services at UF Health Shands, is hopeful that RFID’s use will expand to hospital operating rooms and anesthesia workstations. The ability to use drugs pre-tagged by pharmaceutical manufacturers would further simplify medication management workflows, saving her team time and frustration, she told Healthcare IT News.

After determining that its health system regularly uses 784 high-value and specialty drugs that cost $100 or more per unit, Texas Children’s worked on developing a new type of RFID system to track these items.

It focused on more efficiently tagging each medication, taking an onerous 12-step process that was fraught with the potential for human error to a simpler two-step workflow. In the new workflow, a pharmacy tech scans the high-value drug to generate a label with all pertinent information that is applied to a box. That box is associated only with that unique medication. The box then moves to a conditioning station where the technician scans the already validated drug label and applies an RFID tag to each unit within the box.

This process has eliminated the need for manual data entry, with each drug associated with a specific RFID location, such as a cabinet or refrigerator. This validates that the drug is the right product, that it’s going to the right location and that the RFID tag is working before it gets there.