It seems like we’ve been moving to a paperless society for years. Going paperless has been touted for the last 20 years, since email became a major form of communication.
Yet, paper chains are alive and well in many industries. But as we move rapidly into a highly digitalized world, signs of a long-predicted paperless society re-birth are becoming evident.
Newspapers seem to be a dying breed, with more and more people opting to receive their news online. And with the maturation of RFID technology, paper trails that have been required to document the movement of products through the supply chain could become a thing of the past, as chips capable of holding more information and being read from greater distances penetrate the market.
While some will always prefer a paperback book over an e-book, and a newspaper over Googling, nobody likes the status quo when it comes to the manual data capture process prevalent within the complex clinical trial industry. RFID technology stands to make monumental change when it comes to how clinical trials are conducted, the costs involved, and the archaic ways in which critical information is gathered and documented during the lengthy clinical trial process.
The primary reason that retailers, healthcare providers and the aerospace industry are embracing RFID is to remove the inaccuracies that result from manual data collection. Retailers are on the way to improving in-store inventory levels from 65 percent on average to the high 90s. The aerospace industry is embedding thousands of RFID tags on planes to simplify maintenance and document reporting.
Imagine the gains that pharma companies and clinical trial providers could see by deploying the same technology to track storage, time stamp and environmental data.
