RFID technology tracks and monitors medicines and equipment

In recent years, drug safety problems have occurred frequently. In 2006, there were several drug suspension incidents in China: the Ministry of Health urgently stopped Xinfu, and the State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA) stopped Houttuynia cordata injection, etc., because of problems. 2. Counterfeit and shoddy drugs have caused harm to people's lives. According to the report of the World Health Organization, the proportion of global counterfeit medicines has exceeded 10%, and the global annual sales of counterfeit medicines have exceeded US $ 32 billion, of which 60% are in developing countries. One-third of the world s annual deaths result from unreasonable medication. Approximately 7,000 inpatients in the United States die each year from using the wrong medicine. According to the data provided by the Chinese Pharmaceutical Association, in China, at least 200,000 people die every year due to wrong medication or improper medication. The number of unqualified medication occupies 11% to 26% of the medication, and 10% of daily emergency cases are due to medication errors cause.

Therefore, RFID technology plays an important role in tracking and monitoring medicines and equipment and rectifying and standardizing the medical supplies market. According to the report of "Global Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Application Market", the revenue of RFID in the healthcare and pharmaceutical application market in 2011 will grow to US $ 2.3188 billion, with a compound annual growth rate of 29.9%. Among them, the compound annual growth rate of the drug tracking market will be close to 32.8%, and the compound annual growth rate of the medical device tracking market will reach 28.9%.

At present, electronic supervision codes are mainly used in my country's drug circulation supervision. The State Food and Drug Administration requires that the production and operation enterprises listed in key medicines complete the code assignment on the network before October 31, 2008, and those that do not use the unified identification of the electronic supervision codes of medicines shall not be allowed to sell. The electronic supervision code identification is composed of 20 digits, one-dimensional barcode and prompt information. The electronic supervision code is the identification given by the Chinese government to implement electronic supervision on products for each item, and it is the ID card of the article, but the electronic supervision code has inherent technical defects:

(1) Low safety performance. The electronic supervision code is a one-dimensional bar code, which has low technical complexity, low forgery difficulty, and low security performance.

(2) The information cannot be changed. The information of the electronic supervision code can only be read and cannot be written by printing, and the data information contained in it is fixed and cannot be changed.

(3) The information reading speed is slow.

(4) It belongs to visual communication and has poor anti-interference ability.

RFID has great application potential in drug anti-counterfeiting and tracking and supply chain management. It uses RFID technology to track each link of each drug in sales and records it in the database in real time, which greatly guarantees the safety of drugs in the circulation link. RFID drug management aims to use high and new technologies to achieve the safety supervision of special drugs and chemical reagents, prevent the flow of counterfeit drugs, expired drugs, and prohibited drugs into the market, promote the correct use of drugs by "doctors and patients", and curb the unhealthy price of drugs and monopolize the drug market The occurrence of the phenomenon improves the monitoring of the environmental conditions of drug transportation and storage; drug manufacturers can also dynamically monitor the flow and sales of drugs through this system in order to adjust the production and inventory of drugs and improve their operational efficiency.

As a manufacturer of medicines, pharmaceutical companies are responsible for attaching RFID electronic labels of medicines to the packaging. There are two types of pharmaceutical RFID electronic tags, one is the electronic tag attached to the small packaging box of each sales unit, and the other is the UHF tag attached to the packaging carton.

Drug wholesale enterprises, drug retail enterprises, medical institutions, etc. need to be equipped with special RFID reading and writing equipment. Drug distributors perform product authenticity verification and circulation information writing operations during product entry and exit.

The drug control department may use a handheld machine to conduct on-site inspection and identification of the drugs in circulation and units sold by the drug circulation-related units. Manage the identity registration and digital certificate issuance of pharmaceutical manufacturing enterprises, pharmaceutical distribution enterprises, pharmaceutical retail enterprises, and medical institutions. The RFID readers used by various enterprises and institutions are also authenticated and managed through appropriate mechanisms. When consumers buy medicines in hospitals or pharmacies, the authenticity of the medicines is authenticated through the UHF RFID reading and writing equipment or self-service authentication terminals in the hospitals or pharmacies.