In Depth

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

"Patients put trust in the states licensing the pharmacies, and that pharmacists are only buying legitimate products," says Carmen Catizone, executive director of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacies. "But right now, they can't do that, because they don't have a pedigree" of where the drug came from.

5. The pharmaceutical industry is this close to widespread RFID adoption.

Given all these challenges and limitations, it may come as no surprise that the move to implement RFID technology to secure the nation's drug supply has hit some speed bumps, years after it was first promoted as the Next Big Thing for pharma. The FDA, after delaying for years the deadline for when the industry should have electronic pedigrees in placeones that it says, most likely, will rely on RFID technologyrecently announced its biggest delay of all: It was giving up on setting a deadline.

Back in 2004, explains Ilisa Bernstein, the FDA's director of pharmacy affairs, "we thought there would be widespread use by 2007. We're not there. So rather than setting another deadline, we're leaving it to the stakeholders themselves to come up with a deadline." (An injunction of the Prescription Drug Marketing Act, the 1987 law that allows the FDA to set this regulation, has not helped. For more, see "Legislative Tangle" on Page 20.)

Still, the FDA continues to say (as it has for years) that RFID technology is the "most promising" means of authenticating drugs.

"We keep saying this is a promising solution," Bernstein says. "We want to say that this is a solution, but we're not there yet because people haven't adopted it. There's a lot of work going on behind the scenes, but you have to cross over the line and just jump right in and start doing it."

In the end, it may turn out that both the RFID boosters and the naysayers are right: RFID technology may in fact be the most promising way to mitigate an unsolvable problem. But only time will tell.

"We need more customer validation of the solutions that are being used today," says Michael Liard, a research director at ABI Research who studies RFID. "If companies are finding ROI or business benefits, they're hard-pressed to share those because those are now sources of competitive differentiation. So getting them to communicate the benefits that they're realizing is a challenge that we're going to have to address as an industry."

Other stories by Sarah D. Scalet

• Email
• Print
• Comments
• Digg This
• SlashDot