The Food and Drug Administration today announced that SurgiChip, a revolutionary RFID solution that uses RFID printer/encoders and labels from Zebra Technologies, has been cleared for marketing. The system embeds and prints information on an RFID “smart” label that travels with the patient into surgery to help prevent errors. 

“The ”authentication at the point of dispensing” pilot has been organized by start-up Aegate and brings together six U.K. pharmaceutical companies – including Merck Generics U.K., Merck Pharmaceuticals, Novartis, Schering Health Care and Solvay – and 50 dispensing outlets, which include hospitals and small pharmacies across England. Aegate says its trial is targeted only at providing pharmacists and doctors with information in a pragmatic way to authenticate products at the point of dispensing. ”

As a sign of growing momentum towards an interoperable consignment tracking network among NATO members, Denmark’s Ministry of Defence has contracted with Savi Technology to deploy a software platform linked with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies for tracking and managing supply chain shipments in real-time. This solution will be interoperable with RFID-driven networks already developed by Savi Technology for NATO’s Afghanistan Supply Chain, the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence and the U.S. Department of Defense. The latest development was announced today at the opening of the Defence Asset Management Conference in The Thistle Tower Hotel, London. 

“Food and Drug Administration officials released new policy guidelines today designed to stimulate the use of passive radio frequency identification (RFID) tags for prescription drugs, and Purdu Pharma officials said they will start using the technology this week on shipments to two large customers of the company’s OxyContin narcotic pain treatment drug. FDA officials recommended in February that the pharmaceutical industry should adopt the technology by the start of 2007 to help combat the proliferation of counterfeit drugs. They added that they believe RFID will also eventually produce significant savings to the drug industry through supply-chain efficiency improvements.”

Best of the bunch article covering the FDA’s RFID guidelines.  

Rom Eizenberg is the Director of Marketing and Business Development at Precision Location Systems of Tel Aviv, Israel and Milan, Italy. The company specilizes in identification, location and control technologies for the asset management market.

Your company uses cameras and RFID together to increase the accuracy of asset tracking systems. What prompted the development of this technology?

Working in the industry from its infant days, we found that using simple one-way RF beaconing tags (as common in the market today) simply won’t do it. The limitations of RF triangulation basically forbid high accuracy location when a 95% accuracy success rate and reasonable price tests are implemented. It just doesn’t work. We searched for a frequency that would give us low-cost, sub-meter accuracy. We found our solution with optics and the very short waves spectrum, combining them with traditional RF. 

“x_Tract is designed to monitor key environmental parameters, such as temperature and time, for thermally sensitive goods as they move through a supply chain. GLI claims that the product provides a more efficient and cost effective means of achieving ‘near real time’ traceability. This is a critical time for food companies that rely on freight transportation. In addition to greater pressure to achieve complete traceability, there is currently a squeezed supply of refrigerated shipping containers in the US and elsewhere.”

Shipping giant UPS has studied RFID for a number of years, yet hasn’t adopted the technology for its world-wide operation. The company delivered some 3.4 billion packages and documents last year.

“RFID hasn’t been adopted for widespread use, but we do have pilots currently underway,” said Donna Barrett, UPS’ technology public relations manager from the company’s Atlanta, Georgia office. One of the pilots is taking place at Worldport, UPS’s four million square-foot facility at Louisville, Kentucky, which serves as the company’s main air hub.