Solutions: Healthcare

The BDC Patient-Drug Tracking Network

Background

Millions of physical interactions take place each day in a healthcare organization. In particular, throughout a geographic region, many patients are treated and prescribed pharmaceuticals to support their treatment or therapy. The tracking of the distribution of these drugs can yield remarkable information to many strategic organizations.

Bonsai Development Corporation (BDC) has worked with a National Healthcare Organization to develop a distributed Patient-Drug Tracking Network. This involves the use of widespread automated data capture technology, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tagging of pharmaceutical packages, and the implementation of Personal Identity Cards. This network provides tremendous visibility and insight into the treatment patterns and cost of healthcare for a regional system.

The Problem

The tracking of which drugs are consumed, where and when, and by whom, is often a mystery. Data exists about parts of the puzzle. Where drugs are sold, there may be Point of Sale (POS) data. There may be a prescription tracking system to document what doctors are prescribing to which patients. Drug companies and distributors have sophisticated distribution and replenishment systems that track the supply chain and control how drugs are delivered to the right location.

Despite this, there are several problems which make it difficult or impossible to track the consumption of drugs by patients:

Many systems are paper based, involve isolated databases, and contain information which is rarely shared for medical research, administration & accounting, or health safety reporting purposes.
Drugs can be high value items, which are frequently resold, counterfeited or stolen. The problem of counterfeit drugs, which represent 7% of all drugs prescribed in the USA, is often much greater in overseas markets.
In National Health Systems, especially in poorer regions, technical infrastructure is limited, record-keeping is paper-based and the tracking of patient-drug combinations is extremely difficult.

What does BDC offer?

BDC has developed an RFID Information Network to track the distribution of drugs across a wide geographical area down to detailed patient level. We do this using three key components:

Patient ID Cards, using smart chip identification and/or RFID (contact-less) technology
RFID tags on packaged prescription drugs
Distributed, low-cost data device technology to capture and aggregate information arising from the drug-patient combinations.

Download the white paper on the BDC Patient-Drug Tracking Network (PDF format).