“Now, librarians at the Vatican Library are using cutting-edge technology to keep track of the priceless ancient collection. About 30,000 books have been tagged with radio frequency identification (RFID) chips since implementation of the technology began last year. Two million of the 40-million piece collection will be tagged in the near future, allowing staff to complete the library’s annual inventory in less than a day, something that previously forced it to close for a whole month.”

The American Civil Liberties Union today urged Virginia not to become the first state in the nation to place radio frequency identification (RFID) chips in its driver’s licenses.

“Until now, the controversy over RFID tags has focused on Wal-Mart and other retail applications,” said Chris Calabrese, Program Counsel of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Project. “But this is the first proposal we’ve seen to include RFIDs in driver’s licenses. That brings the potential intrusion of this technology to a whole new level.” 

“As RFID technology becomes more advanced, they warn, it could allow both the tracking of books borrowed by a reader and the tracking of the reader via his library books. This could permit the government or other interested parties to compile a list of readers who have checked out books on particular topics - a potential invasion of privacy that civil-rights advocates find troubling.”

“But widespread ‘item-level’ tagging may actually happen much sooner–more a question of when, not if–discussions here at a radio frequency identification (RFID) conference indicate. Pharmaceutical companies are gearing up to slap tags on individual packages of certain prescription drugs within the next three years, under a mandate from the Food and Drug Administration, according to executives in that industry speaking at this week’s conference.”

In February of 2004 the FDA issued a regulation requiring barcodes on prescription drug and biological products. The agency hopes to reduce 500,000 medical errors in the next twenty years. Following a number of extraordinarily successful pilots, the electronic medical record and bar coded drug labels lay the foundation for a number of automatic ID products to enter the health care industry. 

Evan Bontemps is the President and CEO of Exavera Technologies Incorporated

How will RFID overcome the barriers that have prevented the adoption of barcodes and electronic medical records?

The healthcare IT market is looking to upgrade their existing paper-based paradigm to the electronic medical record. To cross the technology chasm, the IT departments must include wireless technologies into their network infrastructure. The earliest wireless technology adoption was optical scanning bar code solutions. The intent of bar code was to positively identify the patients through their bar code bracelets and match them with the proper bar code labeled medication to reduce preventable medical errors.