Chapter 35: Application 7 - Pharmaceutical Tracking (2000s) |
Summary of This Chapter |
This chapter tells the story of how the pharmaceutical industry, beginning in the early 2000s, turned to a combination of RFID technology and traditional barcodes to fight a growing wave of drug counterfeiting. The central case is Pfizer's decision to place RFID tags on every bottle of Viagra sold in the United States, a drug that had become one of the most counterfeited products in the world. The chapter examines why barcodes alone proved insufficient for the task, how the U.S. Food and Drug Administration encouraged the industry to adopt RFID, and how this early experiment laid the groundwork for today's global pharmaceutical serialization and traceability systems. Along the way, we will see how the lessons from Viagra spread to other drugs, medical devices, and entire supply chains, creating a new standard for how the physical world of medicine is mapped and secured. |
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The Problem That Would Not Go Away |
In the late 1990s, something disturbing began happening in pharmacies and clinics across the United States. People were showing up with packages of medicine that looked genuine. The bottles had the right shape, the labels had the right colors, and the pills inside looked just like the real thing. But they were not real. They were counterfeits, manufactured in clandestine facilities with no oversight, no quality control, and no guarantee of safety. |
The numbers told a troubling story. Through the late 1990s, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration opened an average of about five counterfeit drug investigations per year. By the early 2000s, that number had jumped to more than twenty per year. The FDA's report 'Combating Counterfeit Drugs,' published in February 2004, made clear that this was not a problem that would solve itself . Counterfeiters were becoming more sophisticated. They had access to better printing equipment, better packaging materials, and better distribution networks. The traditional defenses of the pharmaceutical industry, including tamper-evident packaging and holograms, were being defeated with alarming ease. |
Among all the drugs being counterfeited, one stood out above the rest. Viagra, Pfizer's blockbuster treatment for erectile dysfunction, had become a global target for counterfeiters. The reasons were not difficult to understand. Viagra was expensive. It was in enormous demand. And perhaps most importantly, many patients were too embarrassed to ask their doctors or pharmacists too many questions about the product. A counterfeit pill that looked like Viagra could be sold through unregulated channels, through the internet, through mail order, and even through legitimate wholesalers who had been tricked into accepting fraudulent inventory. |
Pfizer faced a problem that went beyond lost revenue. When a counterfeit Viagra pill caused harm, the patient did not blame the criminal who made it. The patient blamed Pfizer. The brand's reputation, built over decades, could be damaged by a single batch of fake pills. And patients could be genuinely hurt. Counterfeit medicines often contained the wrong active ingredient, the wrong dose, or dangerous contaminants. |
The company needed a way to prove, beyond any doubt, that a bottle of Viagra was genuine. It needed a technology that could not be easily copied, that could be verified quickly, and that could travel with the product through every step of the supply chain. Barcodes, the technology that had served the pharmaceutical industry for decades, were no longer enough. |
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Why Barcodes Could Not Win This Fight Alone |
To understand why Pfizer turned to RFID, we first need to understand the limits of the barcode. A barcode is a simple and elegant idea. It encodes a string of numbers in a pattern of black and white lines that a laser scanner can read. The Universal Product Code, or UPC, became ubiquitous in retail in the 1970s and 1980s. In the pharmaceutical world, the National Drug Code, or NDC, was printed on packages as a barcode so that wholesalers and pharmacies could identify products quickly. |
Barcodes have many virtues. They are cheap to print. They are easy to scan. They are universally understood. But they have a fundamental weakness that becomes catastrophic in the context of counterfeiting: they are trivially easy to duplicate. |
Consider what a barcode actually is. It is a pattern of lines. Anyone with a printer and a basic understanding of barcode formats can reproduce that pattern perfectly. A counterfeiter who obtains a single genuine package can photograph the barcode, print it on a fake label, and attach that label to a counterfeit product. The barcode scanner at the pharmacy will read the correct NDC. The system will report that the product is Viagra. But the product inside the bottle might be anything at all. |
This is not a theoretical vulnerability. It is a vulnerability that counterfeiters exploited routinely. The barcode tells you what the product claims to be. It does not tell you whether that particular package is genuine. It does not carry a unique identity. It does not allow you to trace the package back to a specific manufacturing batch. It does not allow you to detect that the same barcode has been used on a thousand fake packages. |
There is a second limitation that matters just as much in the pharmaceutical context. Barcodes require line of sight. A scanner must be able to see the barcode directly. In a warehouse, workers must physically handle each package, turn it so the barcode faces the scanner, and scan it individually. This is slow, labor-intensive, and error-prone. When McKesson, one of the largest pharmaceutical distributors in the United States, handled up to 1.8 million line items per night across its distribution network, the idea of scanning every single bottle individually was simply not feasible . |
Pharmacists faced a related problem. When a shipment arrived at a pharmacy, the staff could scan the barcode on the outer case, but they could not easily verify that each individual bottle inside the case was genuine. The barcode on the case identified the product. It did not identify the individual units. If a counterfeiter had somehow introduced fake bottles into a genuine case, the barcode on the outside would give no warning. |
For all these reasons, the pharmaceutical industry began searching for something better. What they needed was not just an identifier but a unique, serialized identity for every single package. They needed something that could be read without line of sight, something that could be scanned in bulk, and something that was difficult to duplicate. Radio frequency identification, or RFID, offered exactly those capabilities. |
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How RFID Works and Why It Mattered for Pharmaceuticals |
RFID is, at its core, a simple idea. An RFID tag contains a small microchip and an antenna. When a reader sends out radio waves, the tag's antenna captures that energy, powers up the microchip, and sends back a signal containing the information stored on the chip. Unlike a barcode, the tag does not need to be visible. It does not need to be oriented in any particular direction. It can be read through cardboard, through plastic, and through other materials that would block a laser scanner. |
For pharmaceutical applications, the most important capability of RFID is serialization. Each tag can be programmed with a unique Electronic Product Code, or EPC. This is not just a product code, like the NDC. It is a unique identifier for that specific bottle, that specific case, or that specific pallet. When Pfizer tags a bottle of Viagra with an EPC, that bottle becomes a distinct, traceable object. No other bottle in the world carries the same code. |
This uniqueness is what makes counterfeiting so much harder. A counterfeiter can copy a barcode, but copying an RFID tag's unique EPC is far more difficult. The counterfeiter would need to obtain genuine tags, program them with valid EPCs, and somehow register those EPCs in Pfizer's authentication system. Even if a counterfeiter managed to clone a tag, the cloned tag would have the same EPC as the original. If both the original and the counterfeit appeared in the supply chain, the system would flag the duplicate. One of them would be identified as suspicious. This is a level of protection that barcodes simply cannot provide. |
RFID also enabled bulk reading. A reader could scan an entire case of Viagra, or an entire pallet, in a single operation. The tags would all respond, and the reader would collect every EPC in seconds. This meant that wholesalers and pharmacies could verify shipments without opening boxes or handling individual bottles. It meant that inventory counts could be done automatically. It meant that the supply chain could move faster and with less human labor. |
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recognized these advantages. In its 2004 report 'Combating Counterfeit Drugs,' the FDA recommended the adoption of RFID to create what it called an electronic pedigree, a secure record documenting that a drug was manufactured and distributed under safe and secure conditions . The report outlined an ambitious timeline. In 2004, the industry would conduct feasibility studies. In 2005, manufacturers and wholesalers would begin tagging pallets and cases of high-risk products. By 2006, tagging should reach the individual unit level for drugs most likely to be counterfeited. And by 2007, the FDA envisioned all drugs being tagged at the pallet, case, and unit levels . |
The FDA did not mandate RFID. It recommended it. But the message was clear. The agency believed that RFID was the best available technology for protecting the drug supply chain, and it expected the industry to move in that direction. |
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Pfizer's Decision: Tagging Every Bottle of Viagra |
Pfizer did not wait for the FDA's report to begin exploring RFID. The company had already recognized that Viagra was particularly vulnerable to counterfeiting and that barcodes were not providing adequate protection. In early 2005, Pfizer began a pilot program to tag bottles of Viagra with RFID . |
The scope of the program was remarkable for its time. Pfizer did not limit RFID tagging to cases or pallets. The company decided to place a tag on every single bottle of Viagra sold in the United States. This was item-level tagging at a scale that few companies had attempted. By September 2006, Pfizer had tagged 2.1 million bottles and shipped 1.4 million of them . By the time the program was fully operational, every Viagra bottle in the U.S. supply chain carried an RFID tag. |
The technology chosen by Pfizer reflected the state of RFID at the time. For the individual bottles, Pfizer used high-frequency tags operating at 13.56 MHz. These tags were provided by TAGSYS, a company that specialized in item-level RFID . For cases and pallets, Pfizer used ultra-high-frequency tags operating at 915 MHz, which could be read from greater distances and at higher speeds . |
The HF tags on the bottles had a specific advantage in the pharmaceutical context. High-frequency RFID works better around liquids and metals than UHF does. A bottle of pills is essentially a container of liquid and solid material, and the HF tags were more reliable in that environment. TAGSYS reported that its readers could read up to 400 tags in a dense pack setting, even around liquids and metal surfaces, with an accuracy rate of over 99.9 percent . |
Pfizer made several careful decisions about how the tags would be encoded. Each tag contained an EPC serial number, but Pfizer chose not to include the National Drug Code on the item-level tags. As Peggy Staver, Pfizer's director of product integrity, explained, this was done for privacy and security reasons. Including the NDC would have allowed someone with a rogue reader to identify the type of medication in a truck or warehouse without opening any packages . By using only the serial number, Pfizer ensured that the tag's data would be meaningless to anyone who did not have access to Pfizer's authentication database. |
The labels on the Viagra bottles also included a two-dimensional barcode as a backup. This was a recognition that not every partner in the supply chain would have RFID readers immediately. The 2D barcode could be scanned by conventional equipment, and it carried information that could be used to trace the product if RFID was not available . The combination of RFID and barcode was not a sign of indecision. It was a pragmatic acknowledgment that the transition to a new technology would take time, and that patients needed protection during that transition. |
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The Supply Chain Responds |
Pfizer's decision to tag Viagra bottles created a challenge for the rest of the supply chain. Wholesalers and pharmacies would need RFID readers if they wanted to verify the tags. They would need software systems capable of processing the data. They would need to integrate RFID into their existing workflows. |
McKesson, one of Pfizer's largest distributors, moved quickly. In February 2005, McKesson began reading and authenticating the UHF tags that Pfizer attached to cases and pallets of Viagra at its distribution center in Memphis, Tennessee . The initial focus was on measuring read rates and evaluating how much data the system would generate. |
That data question was not trivial. Paul Fowler, McKesson's vice president of e-commerce and emerging technologies, noted that the company handled up to 1.8 million line items per night. Each line item averaged about seven individual bottles. If each bottle carried an RFID tag, the system would need to process more than 12 million unique EPCs per night . This was a massive increase in data volume compared to barcode scanning, and McKesson needed to understand whether its systems could handle the load. |
By March 2005, McKesson had expanded its pilot to a forwarding distribution center in Sacramento, California, where it began reading both the case-level UHF tags and the item-level HF tags on individual bottles . The company installed RFID interrogators and antennas at the portal to its secured storage area, where Viagra and other high-value products were kept. As pallets passed through the portal, the readers captured the tag data and sent it to software that filtered duplicates, aggregated the reads, and transmitted the information over a secure internet link to an authentication service provided by a company called SupplyScape . |
SupplyScape's RxAuthentication Service compared each EPC against Pfizer's records to verify that the tag had been issued by Pfizer and that the product was genuine. This was the heart of the system. The RFID tag alone was not proof of authenticity. The proof came from the ability to check the tag's unique identity against a secure database that only Pfizer controlled. |
The results of the early pilots were encouraging. By late 2006, McKesson and other wholesalers had completed 200,000 authentications of both item-level and case-level tags. Of those, only 19 tags were found to be 'dead' after leaving Pfizer's facility . That is a failure rate of less than one hundredth of one percent. The technology was working reliably in real-world conditions. |
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What Pfizer Did Not Do |
It is important to be clear about what Pfizer's RFID program was and what it was not. Pfizer's primary goal, in the words of Tom McPhillips, vice president of the company's U.S. Trade Group, was to enhance patient safety by giving pharmacists and patients increased confidence that they were receiving authentic product . The RFID tags served as an authentication tool. A pharmacist could scan a bottle and verify that the EPC was genuine. |
But Pfizer's system was not, initially, a full track-and-trace system. Tracking and tracing requires that every participant in the supply chain capture and share information about product movement. It requires that a bottle be scanned at every handoff, from manufacturer to wholesaler to distributor to pharmacy. Pfizer had tagged its bottles, and some of its partners had installed readers, but the infrastructure for comprehensive track and trace did not yet exist . |
This is a crucial distinction. Authentication answers the question: 'Is this product genuine' Track and trace answers the question: 'Where has this product been, and who has handled it' Authentication is a point-in-time check. Track and trace is a continuous record. Pfizer's Viagra program delivered authentication at scale. It did not yet deliver full track and trace. |
That would come later, as the technology matured and as regulatory pressure increased. But the Viagra program proved that item-level RFID could work in the pharmaceutical supply chain. It proved that tags could survive the journey from factory to pharmacy. It proved that readers could reliably capture data in warehouse environments. And it proved that the authentication model, in which a unique identifier is checked against a secure database, could provide meaningful protection against counterfeiting. |
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Beyond Viagra: The Spread of RFID in Pharmaceuticals |
The Viagra program was a proof of concept, but it was not the end of the story. Other pharmaceutical companies were watching closely. If Pfizer could tag every bottle of Viagra, why not tag other high-risk products |
GlaxoSmithKline and other drugmakers launched their own pilot programs to test RFID technology . The FDA's 2004 report had recommended starting with high-risk products and expanding from there. The industry followed that advice. HIV medications, cancer drugs, and other expensive specialty pharmaceuticals became candidates for RFID tagging. |
The technology itself continued to improve. The original HF tags used on Viagra bottles were effective, but the industry began moving toward UHF tags that offered longer read ranges and faster read rates. Standards development through EPCglobal, the organization responsible for commercializing Electronic Product Code technology, helped ensure that tags and readers from different manufacturers could work together. The goal was interoperability: a tag applied by one company should be readable by any compliant reader in the supply chain. |
The FDA's involvement gave the effort a sense of urgency. The agency's report had set a goal of 2007 for unit-level tagging of high-risk drugs. That goal was not met completely, but it focused industry attention and investment. The FDA also worked with other government agencies to coordinate activities and ensure that regulations would facilitate rather than hinder the adoption of RFID . |
One of the most important developments during this period was the concept of the electronic pedigree. A pedigree is a record documenting the chain of custody of a pharmaceutical product. The Prescription Drug Marketing Act of 1987 had required paper pedigrees for certain drugs, but the paper-based system was widely ignored because it was impractical. The FDA recognized that RFID could create a de facto electronic pedigree, one that would be more secure and less costly than paper . |
The electronic pedigree was not just about preventing counterfeiting. It was also about enabling faster and more precise recalls. If a manufacturing defect was discovered in a particular batch of a drug, an RFID-based pedigree could identify exactly which bottles from that batch had been shipped, where they had gone, and whether they had been dispensed to patients. This was a level of precision that paper records could never match. |
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The Global Dimension: Counterfeiting Knows No Borders |
Counterfeit drugs are not just an American problem. They are a global problem, and in some regions, they are a deadly one. The World Health Organization has estimated that in some developing countries, a significant percentage of medicines on the market are counterfeit or substandard. Malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV medications have been particularly targeted by counterfeiters, with devastating consequences for patients who receive ineffective or toxic treatments. |
The pharmaceutical supply chain is global. Active pharmaceutical ingredients may be manufactured in one country, formulated into finished doses in another, packaged in a third, and distributed around the world. A counterfeit product introduced anywhere in that chain can end up anywhere else. This is why international standards for identification and traceability matter so much. |
GS1, a not-for-profit organization that develops global standards for business communication, played a central role in creating the data standards that made pharmaceutical traceability possible. The GS1 system includes standards for barcodes, for RFID tags, and for the electronic exchange of supply chain data. The GS1 Tag Data Standard defines how information should be encoded on RFID tags, ensuring that a tag applied in one country can be read and understood in another . |
For pharmaceutical products, the GS1 standard includes the Global Trade Item Number, which identifies the product; a serial number, which identifies the individual unit; the lot number, which identifies the manufacturing batch; and the expiration date. All of this information can be encoded on a single RFID tag. When a reader captures that data, the entire history and identity of the product becomes available . |
The European Union took a different regulatory path than the United States, but with the same goal. The Falsified Medicines Directive, adopted in 2011, required safety features on prescription medicines, including a unique identifier and an anti-tampering device. The system that emerged relied primarily on 2D barcodes rather than RFID, but the underlying principle was the same: every package of medicine should have a unique identity that can be verified at the point of dispensing . |
The differing approaches, barcode-based in Europe and increasingly RFID-based in the United States, reflect different trade-offs. Barcodes are cheaper, and the infrastructure to read them is more widely deployed. RFID is faster, can read without line of sight, and is more difficult to counterfeit. Both approaches serve the same goal: ensuring that the medicine a patient receives is genuine. |
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The Lessons of the 2000s |
The pharmaceutical industry's experience with RFID in the 2000s offers several lessons that apply far beyond the world of medicine. |
The first lesson is that authentication and traceability are different problems that require different solutions. A barcode can authenticate a product type. It can tell you that a package claims to be Viagra. But it cannot authenticate an individual unit. It cannot tell you that this specific bottle is genuine. RFID, with its unique serial numbers, can do that. And the combination of unique identity with a secure database enables both authentication and traceability. |
The second lesson is that technology adoption in complex supply chains requires coordination. Pfizer could tag its bottles, but the tags were useless unless wholesalers and pharmacies had readers. The wholesalers could install readers, but they needed a reason to do so. The FDA's recommendations provided that reason by signaling that RFID was the expected direction of travel. Standards development through GS1 and EPCglobal ensured that the technology would be interoperable. No single company could solve the problem alone . |
The third lesson is that the transition from one technology to another is rarely clean. Pfizer included 2D barcodes on its RFID-tagged Viagra bottles as a backup. This was not technological indecision. It was practical realism. The supply chain includes thousands of organizations, some of which are more advanced than others. A transition that ignores this reality will fail. |
The fourth lesson is that the value of RFID extends beyond counterfeiting. Pfizer's primary motivation was patient safety. But the same tags that authenticated Viagra bottles could also be used for inventory management, for expiration date tracking, for recall management, and for supply chain optimization. The cost of the technology could be justified by multiple benefits, not just the single benefit of anti-counterfeiting. |
The fifth lesson is that the problem never stands still. Counterfeiters adapted to holograms. They adapted to tamper-evident packaging. They would adapt to RFID as well, if they could. The FDA's 2004 report acknowledged that there was no single magic bullet that would solve the problem permanently. The goal was not to make counterfeiting impossible. The goal was to make it difficult enough, and risky enough, that counterfeiters would find other lines of work . |
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The Legacy: From Viagra to the Digital Supply Chain |
The Viagra RFID program was a beginning, not an end. The technology and the regulatory framework that emerged from the 2000s continue to evolve and expand. |
In the United States, the Drug Supply Chain Security Act of 2013 created a national framework for tracing prescription drugs through the supply chain. The law required that products be serialized at the package level, that transaction information be exchanged electronically, and that systems be in place to verify and investigate suspect products. The deadline for full compliance was originally set for 2023, though enforcement has been phased in . |
The DSCSA does not mandate RFID. It is technology-neutral, allowing companies to use 2D barcodes, RFID, or any other method that meets the requirements. But the capabilities that RFID offers, including bulk reading and unique serialization, make it an attractive option for companies that want to go beyond the minimum requirements. |
Recent pilot studies have demonstrated the potential. The Axia Institute at Michigan State University conducted a two-phase study to test whether RFID could support end-to-end traceability in the pharmaceutical supply chain. In the second phase, conducted in a real-world distribution center operated by Cencora, the researchers achieved 100 percent traceability for nearly 7,000 tagged items. All exceptions, including missing or extra products, were automatically identified and resolved in real time . |
The study also highlighted the importance of standards. Using GS1 standards for encoding the RFID tags ensured that the data could be read and understood by different systems across the supply chain. Without common standards, each organization's RFID deployment would be an island, unable to communicate with the others . |
The technology has also spread beyond oral medications. Prefilled syringes, which are used in acute and critical care settings, can be tagged with RFID to enable automatic identification and tracking . Medical devices, including those used in cardiac catheterization procedures, are being tracked with a combination of barcodes and RFID. A study conducted in Japan integrated GS1 barcodes and RFID to track the chronological order of device usage during percutaneous coronary interventions, achieving a mean Kendall rank correlation coefficient of 0.95 . This level of precision supports recall management, enables retrospective analysis, and could eventually support real-time detection of complications. |
The pharmaceutical supply chain has become a testing ground for technologies that are now spreading to other industries. Food safety, aerospace parts tracking, luxury goods authentication, and many other domains face problems similar to drug counterfeiting. The lessons learned from Viagra, the standards developed by GS1, and the regulatory frameworks established by the FDA and other agencies provide a template that others can follow. |
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Detailed Summary |
This chapter has examined the pharmaceutical industry's adoption of RFID technology in the 2000s, using Pfizer's Viagra anti-counterfeiting program as the central case study. We began by tracing the problem: a dramatic increase in drug counterfeiting in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with Viagra becoming one of the most counterfeited products in the world. We examined why barcodes, the incumbent identification technology, proved inadequate for this challenge. Barcodes are easy to duplicate, require line of sight, and do not provide unique identities for individual packages. They can identify a product type but cannot verify that a specific package is genuine. |
We then explored how RFID addressed these limitations. RFID tags can be read without line of sight, can be read in bulk, and can store unique serial numbers through the Electronic Product Code. This unique identity is what makes RFID fundamentally different from barcodes. A counterfeiter can copy a barcode pattern, but cannot easily clone a unique EPC that is registered in a secure authentication database. |
The FDA's role in encouraging RFID adoption was examined. The agency's 2004 report 'Combating Counterfeit Drugs' recommended RFID as the best available technology for protecting the drug supply chain and outlined an ambitious timeline for adoption. While the timeline was not fully met, the report focused industry attention and investment. |
Pfizer's Viagra program was described in detail. Beginning in early 2005, Pfizer placed high-frequency RFID tags on every bottle of Viagra sold in the United States, with ultra-high-frequency tags on cases and pallets. By September 2006, 2.1 million bottles had been tagged. The tags contained unique EPCs but deliberately excluded the National Drug Code for privacy reasons. A 2D barcode was included as a backup for supply chain partners without RFID readers. The program cost approximately $5 million in its first phase. |
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The response of supply chain partners was discussed, particularly McKesson's deployment of RFID readers at its distribution centers in Memphis and Sacramento. The data management challenges were significant, with the potential to generate over 12 million unique EPCs per night across McKesson's network. The authentication process, which checked each EPC against Pfizer's database through a service provided by SupplyScape, was described. Early results showed a failure rate of less than one hundredth of one percent for tags after leaving Pfizer's facility. |
The chapter distinguished between authentication and track-and-trace capabilities. Pfizer's Viagra program delivered item-level authentication, allowing a pharmacist to verify that a specific bottle was genuine. It did not initially deliver comprehensive track and trace, which would require every participant in the supply chain to capture and share data at every handoff. This distinction is important for understanding both the achievements and the limitations of the program. |
The global dimension of pharmaceutical counterfeiting was addressed. Counterfeit drugs are a worldwide problem, and the pharmaceutical supply chain is global. The role of GS1 in developing international standards for barcode and RFID data encoding was explained. The European Union's Falsified Medicines Directive was mentioned as a parallel regulatory effort, though it relied primarily on 2D barcodes rather than RFID. |
The chapter concluded with five lessons from the 2000s: that authentication and traceability are different problems requiring different solutions; that technology adoption in complex supply chains requires coordination; that transitions between technologies are rarely clean; that the value of RFID extends beyond counterfeiting to inventory management and supply chain optimization; and that the problem of counterfeiting is never permanently solved but must be continuously addressed. |
Finally, the legacy of the Viagra program was traced to the present day. The Drug Supply Chain Security Act of 2013 created a national framework for pharmaceutical serialization and traceability in the United States. Recent pilot studies have demonstrated 100 percent traceability using RFID in real-world distribution environments. The technology has spread to medical devices, prefilled syringes, and other applications. The pharmaceutical supply chain has served as a testing ground for technologies and standards that are now being applied in food safety, aerospace, and other industries. |
The story of pharmaceutical tracking in the 2000s is a story about how the physical world of medicine became mapped in a new way. Every bottle of Viagra that carried an RFID tag became a node in a network of information, linked to a database that could verify its authenticity. The barcode, which had served the industry for decades, did not disappear. It remained as a backup, a low-cost alternative, and a bridge to partners who had not yet adopted RFID. But the future belonged to technologies that could give every individual package a unique identity, a digital fingerprint that could travel with it from the factory to the patient. |
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That future is still unfolding. The infrastructure is not yet complete. Not every drug is serialized. Not every pharmacy has a reader. Not every counterfeit is caught. But the direction is clear, and the path was mapped in the 2000s, when Pfizer decided that barcodes were too easy to duplicate and that the bottles of Viagra needed a better way to prove they were real. |
cs@easiersoft.com