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The technology can provide almost instantaneous feedback on product authenticity and warn about impending expiry or batch recalls
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Seven months ago, two counterfeit medicines — fake versions of
Cialis and Reductil — were found in the legitimate supply chain
in the space of 10 days. Amid rising concern about counterfeit medicines,
which the US Food and Drug Administration believes account for 10 per
cent of the global pharmaceuticals market, how can pharmacists be sure
that the medicines they dispense are not counterfeit?
A three-month trial of radio-frequency
identification (RFID) as a way of confirming the authenticity of medicines
immediately before they are dispensed has been a success, according to
Aegate, the company that carried it out.
The pilot, conducted in 37 community pharmacies, nine hospitals and four
dispensing doctors’ surgeries between October 2004 and January
2005, has shown that RFID tags and printed barcodes can be mass deployed
and that pharmacists are keen to gain the advantages offered by the technology.
“It’s going to be a very useful tool,” said Felicity
Davies, of Cordon Pharmacy, Pulborough, West Sussex. “It does what
it says: it authenticates the product in terms of being the right product,
in
date and not counterfeit. It’s an additional check on what is being
dispensed.”
However, the technology involved is not new, according to BT’s
Geoffrey Barraclough. “The technology is tried and tested,” he
said. “It’s not cutting edge; it doesn’t need to be.”
How RFID tags work
An RFID tag comprises a microchip surrounded by a coiled antenna.
The scanner directs a radio beam at the tag which generates a current
in the antenna by inductive coupling. This allows the chip to transmit
back its stored data. RFID tags to be used for pharmaceuticals
only store an identifying number. |
What
is new, however, is the way the technology is used and the multipurpose
scanner that has been built to make it useable in a pharmacy environment.
So that pharmacies will not need different scanners for different manufacturers’ products,
Aegate has designed a single box that can read RFID tags, linear barcodes
and two-dimensional barcodes and then check a central database of product
details via the internet and display what is recorded there.
Products from six manufacturers — Merck Generics UK, Merck Pharmaceuti-cals,
Novartis, Schering Health Care, Solvay and one that is not prepared to
be named — were identified with barcodes or RFID tags for the purposes
of the trial. Overall, 20,000 packs from these manufacturers were tagged
with either RFID tags or barcodes that gave a unique identity to each
individual pack; 180,000 products were scanned during the three-month
trial. Products that were not part of the trial were authenticated by
their European Article Number (EAN) barcodes.
What all this means, is that there is now a tried and tested system that
will allow pharmacists and their dispensing staff to check whether or
not a product is genuine, or even the right product, immediately before
it is dispensed. More than this, they can be warned that it is approaching
its expiry date and whether it is subject to a product recall.
All this depends, of course, on manufacturers being prepared to pay for
vast numbers of RFID tags and to register them on a central computer
along with details — identity, pack size, batch number, expiry
date — of the products they have been applied to.
Pharmacists will also have to be prepared to install, use, and probably
pay for, the scanners that will be necessary to read the tags.
So what happens now?
“Any future development of the system would have to be compatible
with the electronic transfer of prescriptions,” says Mrs Davies.
Nigel Cox, pharmacy systems development executive at the National Pharmaceutical
Association, agrees.
“There is potential here for the direct input of data from ETP
and to match the product with the prescription,” he says.
To this end, Aegate has been involved in talks with the National
Patient Safety Agency and staff involved with the NHS
National Programme for IT.
“They are supportive and interested,” says Ian Rhodes, Aegate’s
chief executive. “Government endorsement is a target.”
The company is also actively involved with six pharmacy IT system suppliers
and has had discussions with the others. It has already shown that scanned
product details can be directly imported into patient medication records
and labelling systems.
“We want as many people as possible to embrace RFID,” says
Mr Rhodes. “But
we don’t need to have every manufacturer signed up from day one
to be able to take it forward. Development has started on a commercial
scanner and a commercial database. We are in detailed discussions with
all major stakeholders and are trying to get to the commercial stage
with everyone in concert.” |
The
Pharmaceutical Journal