Role seen for RFID in medical device tracking

摘要

New traceability regulations on medical devices and prescription drugs from the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) call for serialized, item-level tracking of goods, but don't specify the exact automatic identification and data capture (AIDC) technology to use. Since radio frequency identification (RFID) has the advantage of not requiring line-of-sight scanning, you might think RFID is an ideal technology to use for tracking items to help comply with the new FDA rules, but yet RFID is not seen as the method of choice for many tracking scenarios. Why is RFID not seen as a "cure all" for traceability needs in health care? There are two main reasons, say vendors: the cost of the tagging and RFID infrastructure relative to the value of certain goods, and the accuracy of conventional, long-range RFID systems for closely stacked, small items common to order picking.