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Drug distributor sees RFID's time as 'now' (sidebar)

For the H.D. Smith Wholesale Drug Co., a national distributor of prescription drugs, the “when” of implementing radio-frequency identification (RFID) as a track-and-trace packaging security tool is “now.”The Springfield, IL-based company is implementing a pilot RFID program for Class 2 drugs out of its distribution center in Springfield.

H.D. Smith is following the lead of the Food and Drug Administration, which has identified RFID as a key packaging tactic in fighting counterfeiters and improving drug security. The strategy is simple: If you know where a drug is in the supply chain, you add security.

In its pilot program, H.D. Smith is putting RFID tags on primary packages of Class 2 pharmaceuticals, the drugs most likely to be abused because of their narcotic properties. They are currently among the most labor-intensive drugs for distributors to handle.

“We know this is a technology that is right for our industry,” says Robert Kashmer, vice president of information technology at H.D. Smith. “We know there will be efficiencies from using this technology. We’re not there now, because we’re putting the tags on by ourselves, but it will come.

“We want to look at the product in the supply chain and the authentication portion of the process,” he continues. “To us, it is an important step, and we want to embrace this.”

In the pilot operation, H.D. Smith personnel are manually applying tags to unit packages they sell to a specific group of pharmacies.

The company is using tags from Matrics, Inc. The tags are rectangular, 30 mm by 36 mm (approximately an inch by an inch-and-a-half). Each holds 96 bits of information, enough capacity to carry an electronic product code (EPC). Tags are “read only” with an individual EPC number already coded to each tag. The code is unique to each package and allows each individual package to be identified during its trip through the distribution system.

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