RFID, Visibility, and the Future of Healthcare Operations

RFID use is expanding in healthcare. How do you see it improving patient safety and clinician efficiency?

Pleshek:

At its core, RFID solves a trust problem. Across healthcare and life sciences, whether it’s a hospital pharmacy, an operating room stocked with implants, or a research lab managing high-value reagents, knowing what’s on the shelf today depends on someone scanning, counting, or logging it correctly. Every manual step is a point where errors enter, and in healthcare, errors have consequences.

RFID changes that equation. When an enclosure is accessed, the system knows exactly what’s inside, automatically, accurately, without anyone having to remember a step. That gives teams something invaluable: confidence that what the system says matches what’s actually there.

The patient safety implications are immediate. In a recall situation, identifying every affected unit across a health system, medications, implants, devices, can take days of manual searching. With RFID and standardized item-level encoding, it’s answered in seconds: which units, which locations, which patients may have been affected. That speed matters when patient safety is on the line.

On the efficiency side, the gains are significant and they compound. Manual inventory workflows that once consumed hours of staff time are replaced by automated, real-time counts. Staff time shifts from counting and chasing inventory to the clinical and operational work they were hired to do. And because you have real-time visibility into what’s actually being consumed, you can right-size inventory based on data rather than overstocking out of uncertainty, whether that’s pharmaceuticals, surgical supplies, or laboratory materials.

But the most meaningful efficiency gain may be the hardest to measure: when clinicians and staff trust their inventory data, they stop building workaround caches, stop hoarding supplies, and stop spending mental energy on inventory anxiety. That attention goes back where it belongs, to patients and the work that drew them to healthcare in the first place.

What are the current challenges in the adoption of RFID in healthcare?

Pleshek:

The technology itself isn’t the barrier, RFID hardware is proven, tags are reliable, and read accuracy is well-established. What slows adoption is the work required to bring the broader ecosystem together.

The first challenge is tagging. Today, many healthcare and life science organizations still tag items manually when they arrive, applying RFID tags, associating them with product data, and verifying accuracy, item by item. For high-volume environments, that’s a real commitment of time and staff. Source tagging, where manufacturers embed the RFID tag before the product ships, is the long-term solution, and we’re encouraged by the progress manufacturers are making. But until source tagging reaches broader scale, the organizations deploying RFID carry much of that burden, and we work closely alongside them to make the process as streamlined as possible.

The second challenge is interoperability. RFID data is only as valuable as the systems it connects to, your EHR, your ERP, your inventory platform, your analytics tools. Open standards provide a common language to make that possible, but many legacy systems weren’t designed with those standards in mind. We believe strongly that RFID infrastructure should be built on open standards and open architectures, systems that can feed data into any downstream platform rather than locking it inside a proprietary silo. But bridging that gap with legacy environments still takes time, budget, and coordination across departments that are already stretched thin. Strong partnerships between technology providers, health systems, and standards bodies make the difference.

The third challenge is making the business case. The benefits of RFID span multiple departments, clinical operations, supply chain, finance, compliance, patient safety, but the investment often has to be justified through a single budget line. Organizations that have moved forward successfully tend to be the ones that frame RFID not as a departmental purchase, but as an enterprise investment in operational visibility. Helping our partners build and communicate that case is something we take seriously, because the value is real, it just needs to be seen across the full picture.

Where do you see the future of RFID in healthcare?

Pleshek:

The future of RFID in healthcare is about what the data makes possible, not just what the tag tracks.

Today, most RFID implementations solve specific, high-value operational problems: tracking medications in a cabinet, managing kit and tray replenishment, monitoring temperature-sensitive biologics, preventing expiration waste. Those are meaningful use cases that deliver immediate results. But they’re the foundation, not the ceiling.

What’s emerging is a world where every medication, implant, and high-value supply is tagged at the point of manufacture, encoded with standardized data including product identity, lot, serial number, and expiration, and that information travels with the item through every hand it passes, from manufacturer to distributor to the point of care. When that becomes reality, RFID evolves from an inventory tool into the connective tissue of the healthcare supply chain. Recalls become instant. Supply shortages become something you anticipate rather than react to. Compliance with regulations shifts from a manual reporting burden to a natural byproduct of how you already operate.

The next frontier is intelligence. RFID generates a continuous stream of real-time, item-level data on how supplies move and are consumed across a health system, while advances in AI and machine learning are what will make that data actionable at scale. Pattern recognition that would take an analyst weeks, identifying consumption anomalies, predicting stockouts before they happen, correlating usage patterns with clinical outcomes, becomes continuous and automatic. Organizations will be able to answer questions that simply aren’t answerable today: What does care for a specific procedure actually cost? Where are the hidden inefficiencies in how we move and stock supplies? Can we see a shortage forming before it disrupts clinical operations? The convergence of item-level RFID data and AI is what turns inventory infrastructure into operational intelligence. The organizations investing in that data foundation now are positioning themselves to unlock those answers first.

The organizations that build this infrastructure won’t just have better inventory systems. They’ll have transformed inventory management from an operational cost center into a strategic advantage, freeing their teams to focus on what matters most: their patients, their people, and the quality of care they deliver.