Applications for RFID in pharmaceutical industry

Abstract

Security and safety are two important features desired in pharmaceutical supply chain and achieving the same is a challenging task. The need to secure and authenticate pharmaceutical products has increased tremendously with the emerging counterfeit product market. The motivation to introduce counterfeit pharmaceutical products in the supply chain could be to gain rapid economic benefits or affecting the reputation of strong brand in the pharmaceutical industry. RFID technology can be used to deter counterfeiting attempts. It can also be used in various other domains in the pharmaceutical industry. The main aim of this paper is to outline all the applications of RFID in the pharmaceutical industry. After explaining the main applications, we discuss how information hiding techniques could be used with RFID to offer efficient expiry date management, pharmaceutical tamper detection, and fraud detection and prevention.