Healthcare, including pharmaceuticals and clinical environments, is an area of particular promise for RFID. Pharmaceutical manufacturers, hospitals and clinics, regulators charged with public safety, retailers and consumers all to benefit from RFID-enabled applications for:

• Patient safety-including product pedigree traceability and medication administration validation
• Asset tracking
• Threat protection
• Recall management
• General supply chain visibility

For manufacturers and hospitals, tagging and tracking high profit margin assets such as medical equipment using low-cost RFID technology is promising . Healthcare providers, meanwhile, hope to lower insurance premiums due to RFID-driven reductions in liability. RFID can also ease compliance with regulatory and reporting mandates, such as pedigree laws for traceability and rules for hospital accreditation.

Rx for RFID in Healthcare
The practical requirements for deploying RFID in healthcare applications are broad as there is a range of potential tag sizes and form factors, as well as a broad spectrum of read ranges to support. Alien Technology focuses on UHF RFID, and Alien systems are suited for long range applications such as rapid, accurate reading off of pallets on conveyors as well as near-field item level tracking of such commodities .

The low cost of Alien's tags also makes them ideally suited for such item level applications, which can require millions of very small tags made to fit under bottle caps, behind small labels or otherwise integrated into the packaging.