Edwards Lifesciences

Curing a logistic headache: You are a leading medical supply company that sells medical equipment and pharmaceuticals to hospitals in the USA. You want to protect and enhance your supply chain while providing your customers with powerful data and tools they can use to manage inventory levels. Could RFID be just what the doctor ordered?

Edwards Lifesciences used RFID to create a prescription for industry inventory ailments including a complex supply chain vulnerable to product diversion and counterfeiting. The company paired UPM Raflatac HF tags with WaveMark’s healthcare inventory tracking system to track product usage. This provided hospital staff with visibility into which items are removed and returned to shelves or used in their original cases. The solution streamlines hospitals’ inventory management processes, identifying products that need to be reordered, are missing or are about to expire. Recalls, historically a labour-intensive, expensive process, are now fast and painless. Furthermore, RFID-tagged cartons are able to withstand rigorous hospital procedures such as sterilization by ethylene oxide (EtO). “We’ve performed extensive tests with UPM Raflatac’s tags and achieved a read accuracy of 99.5% in live hospital environments over the last two years,” notes Pat Griffin, Vice President, Customer Operations for Wavemark.

RFID provides valuable insights that Edward Lifesciences and its customers are using to drive down costs, reduce out-of-stocks and increase patient safety. Now that’s good medicine.