Smart pharmaceutical labels make use of RFID chips and other technologies to provide better tracking, accounting, and management. This is a relatively new technology, but it has a ton of benefits. In fact, it could revolutionize how we prescribe and take medications.
How exactly do these smart labels work? And what does their future look like?
The Basics of Smart Labels
Smart labels in the pharmaceutical industry are a relatively new technology. They incorporate most of what you’re already familiar with in the world of pharmaceutical labels, but they add technologies like RFID tracking, sensors, and sometimes even QR codes.
The combination of these components allows the labels to serve new purposes, extending beyond mere identification. For example, some smart labels are capable of keeping track of product locations in real time, monitoring environmental conditions, and even providing data directly to manufacturers and customers alike.
Increasingly, businesses are adopting smart labels and integrating them into existing systems. This is both because of the many benefits conferred by smart labels and because of the relative inexpensiveness of this simple, yet revolutionary technology.
The Benefits of Smart Labels
These are just some of the benefits offered by smart labels:
- Better inventory management and tracking. Most business owners with physical products understand the importance of consistent, reliable inventory management and tracking. It’s imperative to know where your products are at all times, so you can better manage available space, keep an adequate store of products on hand, and trace productivity and inventory management issues so you can resolve them consistently. RFID chips and other forms of tracking on smart labels make this a cinch; instead of manually keeping tabs on inventory, you can automatically scan and track items in record time. This leads to significant time savings, but also more accurate record keeping, assisting businesses in many ways.
- Superior product security. Smart labels also allow for superior product security. Because smart labels are a relatively advanced technology that isn’t available to everyone, they serve as an important anti-counterfeiting measure. Pharmacists, healthcare providers, and even patients can rest assured that their products haven’t been counterfeited or tampered with.
- Improved supply chain operations. Generally, smart labels allow for improved supply chain operations. Businesses can more closely examine the relationship between nodes in the supply chain, pinpoint issues, and address them more effectively.
- Traceability and authentication. Similarly, smart labels allow for more traceability and authentication. The unique signatures available in smart labels are a massive improvement over traditional labels.
- Product integrity. Because of capabilities for environmental monitoring, smart labels allow for greater product integrity. Medications and other products that require careful environmental consideration can be tracked and analyzed much more easily.
- Higher patient safety. The pharmaceutical industry highly prioritizes patient safety, and for obvious reasons. It’s vitally important to give patients accurate, intact, viable medications, and smart labels minimize errors on all these fronts and more. The end result is that the possibility for errors is greatly diminished and patients can have much greater confidence in the medications they take.
- Easier regulatory compliance. Some business owners also appreciate that smart labels allow for easier regulatory compliance. Laws and regulations in the pharmaceutical space are notoriously complicated, but smart labels resolve many issues in this area.
- Clinical trial applications. Smart labels offer significant benefits in the application of clinical trials. When conducting clinical trials, experiment administrators and staff need to accurately track medications at every step of the process. With smart labels in place, this is faster, more efficient, and more reliable. This strategy can also save you a significant amount of money.
- Hospital and pharmacy management uses. Hospitals and pharmacies also appreciate smart labels for ease of dispensing and management. Again, errors are much less likely, tracking is much easier, and overall, a lot of time and money can be saved.
- Total operational efficiency. Smart labels are one component of a system that trends toward total operational efficiency. With more data, more transparency, more consistent tracking, and superior analysis, business owners can optimize nearly every hiccup and productivity issue in pursuit of nearly perfect efficiency in most regards. This is a process that will take time, close analysis, and diligent recursive improvement, but smart labels streamline many aspects of this process.
Toward a New Future
Already, smart label technology confers myriad benefits, and pharmacies, hospitals, and other businesses all over the country are taking advantage of it. In the near future, we can expect to see smart labels on a much wider variety of products and used much more consistently across disciplines. To make things even more exciting, this is likely the first iteration of the technology that will only get better with time – with practically unlimited possibilities for the distant future.
