Return to RFID Tags to Prevent Counterfeiting Pharmaceuticals

by David Orenstein free-lance writer

Last month Computing Care addressed the implantation of wireless ID chips in patients, an exotic use of a technology called radio frequency identification. That rather avant-garde application hardly is the only one in medicine. RFID transmitters, or tags, now are being considered for less sensational roles in health care, such as fighting drug counterfeiting and preventing cases of mistaken identity leading to mistaken surgery.

In mid-November, the FDA announced guidelines for the pharmaceutical industry as it begins to test RFID tags as a means to fight counterfeiting. Since February 2004 when the FDA released a report documenting an increase in the number of drug counterfeiting cases, the FDA has called for the common use of RFID by 2007 to track and trace drug shipments. In November Acting FDA Commissioner Lester M. Crawford, MD, said, Todays actions were designed with one goal in mind: to increase the safety of medications consumers receive by creating the capacity to track a drug from the manufacturer all the way to the pharmacy.

On the same day, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, and Purdue Pharma announced that they would begin such pilot projects by packaging wholesale quantities of some medicines with the tags. Pfizer will tag the often-counterfeited Viagra by the end of 2005 and Purdue said it already has begun to tag shipments of OxyContin. Glaxo said it would begin tagging an undetermined drug in the next 12 to 18 months.

RFID tags might help fight counterfeiting because they can store small amounts of data that can be retrieved quickly and easily by a handheld reading device. The RFID tag on a wholesale container of a drug will store a serial number unique to the container. When a worker at a pharmacy chains warehouse scans the container, software will attempt to search a database compiled by the drug manufacturer for the unique serial number. A match means the drugs are legitimate, and the database will return confirming information, such as where and when the drugs were made, and how many should be in the container. Counterfeit drugs will not bear the correct serial number and associated data, and, therefore, would not yield a match.

Less than a week after announcing the pharmacy-related application of RFID, the FDA approved another application: the Surgichip. The chip, affixed temporarily to a patient awaiting surgery, stores information about the procedure, when it is to be performed, and who is to perform it. Just before the procedure, hospital staff scans the tag to see this information and asks the patient to confirm it. Surgichip Inc claims the chip will help ensure that patients do not undergo the wrong procedures.

Browser Battles Reborn
A group called Mozilla.org, the intellectual inheritors of the Netscape browser, has released a new browser called Firefox. The fully featured and free browser is meant to compete head-on with Microsofts Internet Explorer.

The good news for browser users is that Firefox appears entirely usable. Although the version number officially is 1.0, the software is based on the old Netscape browser, so it is considerably more mature than a usual 1.0 version.

For security-conscious physicians, the best of Mozillas arguments for switching browsers is that Firefox is not subject to many of the worrisome security problems that constantly seem to afflict Internet Explorer. Of course, it is subject to its own security flaws and as it gains popularity, hackers will target it more aggressively.

For most browsing tasks, the browsers essentially are equivalent, but there are subtle differences that might matter to you or your staff. Firefox downloads and installs easily and takes little hard disk space. It is worth, well . . . exploring.

The author of this monthly column, David Orenstein, is a technology and business writer in Silicon Valley. To learn more about a technology topic in Computing Care, email him at davealli@comcast.net.