LawMeme LawMeme Yale Law School  
LawMeme
Search LawMeme [ Advanced Search ]
 
 
 
 
RFID: Coming to a Pharmacy Near You
Posted by Rebecca Bolin on Tuesday, November 16 @ 15:26:34 EST Privacy
According to the New York Times, the FDA is teaming up with pharmacies and drug manufacturers to implement a voluntary RFID system, or radio tracking system using special barcodes--"barcodes that bark." As anyone who has worked in a retail pharmacy knows, your amber bottles are filled from larger bottles containing a few or possibly hundreds of pills. These can be put in machines that count pills automatically, but records are kept about expiration dates, batches, etc. in case of recalls or other contamination. Records for heavily regulated drugs (such as OxyContin in this project) can be subject to state and federal counts and forms each time one is dispensed or more. Putting RFID in pharmacies makes much more sense to me than the Wal-Mart inventory. Small bottles of expensive drugs--the first targeted in the project--are stolen, contaminated, and worst of all faked. This wouldn't pick up problems at hospital pharmacies, which change bulk packaging into sterile single-use packaging or buy it that way from the start. Still, tracking drugs is a problem in all pharmacies, and RFID sounds like a good start to me.
 
Related Links
· More about Privacy
· News by Rebecca Bolin


Most read story about Privacy:
Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet

Options

 Printer Friendly Page  Printer Friendly Page

 Send to a Friend  Send to a Friend

Threshold
  
The comments are owned by the poster. We aren't responsible for their content.

Leges humanae nascuntur, vivunt, moriuntur
Human laws are born, live, and die

Contributors retain copyright interests in all stories, comments and submissions.
The PHP-Nuke engine on which LawMeme runs is copyright by PHP-Nuke, and is freely available under the GNU GPL.
Everything else is copyright copyright 2002-04 by the Information Society Project.

This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions
set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later.
The latest version is currently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/.

You can syndicate our news with backend.php



Page Generation: 0.315 Seconds