Tuesday, March 19, 2019
Kit Check, the leader in automated medication management solutions for hospitals, and Avery Dennison, a global leader in intelligent label solutions and the world’s largest UHF RFID partner, are partnering to work directly with drug manufacturers worldwide to apply RFID tags to medication packaging. Tagging pharmaceutical products in this way helps improve patient safety by enabling more accurate tracking and authentication of medication through the entire supply chain, with the goal of reducing error rates to nearly zero. It also eliminates the need for cost and labor-intensive in-house medication tagging at hundreds of hospitals.
This partnership provides a complete solution for manufacturers and contract manufacturing organizations (CMOs) that want to implement RFID tagging in facilities that package drugs at high speeds, in line with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Current Good Manufacturing Practices (CGMP), as well as for hospitals looking for end-to-end inventory tracking. The solution provides downstream visibility for manufacturers, giving them the ability to track a particular drug from manufacturer to the point of use, and upstream visibility for hospital pharmacies, enabling them to know the right drug is in the right place at the right time for the right patient, as well as where that drug originated.
“Working with Avery Dennison to tag drugs at the production source enables us to track medications along every point in the supply chain,” said Kevin MacDonald, CEO and co-founder of Kit Check. “We give our customers visibility throughout the care continuum, and the accuracy of Avery Dennison’s tags means better efficiency and safety for pharmacists and patients. Kit Check provides the infrastructure to access the medication information, and Avery Dennison’s global network ensures that the tags work wherever you are - whether that’s on the production line or in the hospital pharmacy. Kit Check and Avery Dennison have proven capability in high-speed cGMP environments, and this partnership will help accelerate the industry’s adoption of RFID to enable better drug supply chain security and visibility.”
Kit Check is a leader in RFID-based medication inventory tracking and automated tray processing in use at more than 500 hospitals in the U.S. and Canada. It is a key partner of Avery Dennison in the healthcare segment, and recently surpassed 60 million tagged medications scanned by customer hospitals. Avery Dennison is a global leader in Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)-enabled solutions, with more than 1,000 patents, as well as applications and global manufacturing capabilities that have produced more than 20 billion RFID tags and labels.
“Avery Dennison is proud to work with Kit Check to ensure performance, reliability and data integrity for medication tracking at every step along the supply chain,” says DJ Lee, director, global RFID channel, Avery Dennison. “In collaboration with Kit Check, we’ve designed a complete system that ensures RFID will work reliably and accurately in hospitals and on high-speed packaging lines, ultimately helping to keep patients safe in hospitals across the U.S.”
