Home » Business Continuity » Supply Chain

The 5 Myths of RFID

Big pharma's RFID trials aim to keep fake drugs out of your medicine cabinetbut the technology has significant limitations.

By Sarah D. Scalet

Page 4

3. RFID technology can be used to mark pills, tablets and elixirs themselves.

When RFID boosters praise the technology as the solution to counterfeit drugs, here's one objection that Novartis's James Christian is quick to raise: No one is marking drugs, only the packaging.

"We have had experience with counterfeit product in genuine packaging, and genuine product in counterfeit packaging," says Christian, who is CSO of the $37 billion company based in Basel, Switzerland, which manufactures a variety of prescription and over-the-counter drugs. "The packaging isn't what's important."

What's more, he says, pharmaceutical products are routinely and legally repackaged in both the United States and the European Union. "If a pharmaceutical company invests a great deal of money into putting security devices in packaging, the product could easily be transferred legally to a package with no security device," he says. "And now someone has a collection of genuine packaging with security devices that they might throw away or use in another manner."

In Christian's opinion, at least, changing the rules that govern how legitimate drugs are distributed could be more effective than using RFID technology in defeating counterfeit drugs. This could mean changing repackaging laws or increasing penalties for counterfeiters. Whether any of this would be easier to accomplish, though, is anyone's guess.

4. RFID technology will let consumers verify that they have purchased legitimate products.

The ultimate goal of using RFID technology as part of an electronic pedigree or track-and-trace program is to allow customers to know that the drugs they have in their medicine cabinet are authentic ones. "The benefit is at the consumer endknowing that the product you're getting came from where it should have come from," says Julie Kuhn, vice president of operations, healthcare supply chain services at Cardinal Health, the $81 billion wholesaler based in Dublin, Ohio.

Yet no onenot the FDA, and not any of the pilot programs being done by the private sectoris actually proposing a way for consumers to validate the products. In fact, it seems likely that RFID tags will be disabled before the drugs reach consumers' hands. This is largely because of privacy concerns that, say, stores could use the information on RFID tags to know what bottle of pills a customer has in his backpack.

Even if the United States does eventually have a track-and-trace program that relies on RFID technology, ultimately the consumer will still be relying on something as old-fashioned as an ice-cream soda: trust in the local apothecary.