Opportunities In Pharmaceutical RFID And Smart Packaging By Peter Harrop, IDTechEx

RFID in healthcare is growing rapidly to become a $2.1 billion global business in 2016. Smart packaging for healthcare has additional value, for example in patient compliance recording blister packs that electronically record when each pill is taken – or more strictly when it is removed from the pack. Aardex has a different version where the plastic bottle of pills is continuously weighed by a load cell in the base. Thus recording when a pill is removed. These packages are used in drug trials and they incorporate RFID so that the record can be linked to the patient. They deal with a problem arising from the fact that 50% of patients take their medication incorrectly either in quantity, time or duration. In rheumatology it is 65%, arthritis and migraine being only 7-15% but most other afflictions are in the 40-60% range for non-compliance – a severe problem for the patient, those prescribing and those trialing drugs.

When two equally efficacious drugs enter the market, the one with better compliance is likely to be more widely used. Non-compliance is costly and risky. It costs $100 billion yearly in the US alone. It costs the drug industry over $8 billion annually in unfilled new and refill prescriptions. Patients are often confused over the reason for the medication. After all, they average only six minutes when meeting the physician. Patients are often not fully convinced that their treatment is necessary. Some do not get their medication in the first case. If they do, then 30-50% of them are not taken correctly, according to MeadWestvaco. Many patients fail to get refills where prescribed and 28% of over 45 year olds admit to discontinuing the prescribed medication prematurely. Antidepressants are particularly bad in this respect. Drug companies have come to realize that spending heavily on creating new blockbuster drugs is risky and less and less cost-effective whereas encouraging patients to take medication correctly benefits the patient, reduces load on physicians and hospitals and sell more of existing, non-contentious drugs.