Fresenius Kabi: Tagging Medications at the Speed of Manufacturing
By adding RAIN RFID tags during manufacturing, Fresenius Kabi — with Impinj and CCL eAgile — is freeing hospital staff to focus on patient care.
Medication monitoring made easy with RAIN RFID
Hospitals and pharmacies that use RAIN RFID to manage, locate, and verify medications in real time know the far-reaching benefits of the technology. The use of RAIN RFID tags and readers allow healthcare employees to manage medication inventory and maintain medical kits and trays at speeds and accuracy levels that far surpass barcodes.
Today, hospitals that use RFID systems to track medications, like Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego, often manually apply RAIN labels to each and every vial and pre-filled dose, which can be a time-consuming and labor-intensive process.
Fresenius Kabi, a global healthcare company, has introduced a solution using Impinj-based tags and readers to alleviate hospitals of this burden. They now add RAIN RFID labels as part of their existing automated labeling process — at line speed. Applying “+RFID” medication labels embedded with Impinj M780 RAIN RFID endpoint ICs at Fresenius Kabi’s manufacturing facility relieves hospitals of a tedious manual task, freeing up staff to focus on patient care and experience the wide range of benefits RAIN provides.
A solution for busy hospital staff
Few pharmaceutical manufacturers apply RAIN RFID tags to medication vials before they are delivered to hospitals — in fact, Fresenius Kabi pioneered this service offering using GS1 coding standards. Hospitals that wanted to take advantage of RAIN’s benefits previously had to shoulder the tagging task themselves, despite the human resources it takes to do so.
For nearly a decade, pharmacy staff at Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego has factored in time to apply RAIN RFID tags to the hundreds of vials and pre-filled syringes it receives from pharmaceutical manufacturers every day, so when Fresenius Kabi started offering pre-tagged vials of its often-used injectable sedative Diprivan® (also known as propofol) in 2021, Steve Wenger, Rady’s inpatient pharmacy manager, jumped at the opportunity to lighten his staff’s load.
Diprivan is just one of several medications Rady uses regularly, Wenger said, and the only one that comes pre-tagged. For those vials, his staff is spared the effort of encoding RAIN RFID tags, affixing them to the medications, and updating the hospital database. But since other pharmaceutical vendors don’t pre-tag, his staff still spends valuable time applying tags by hand to the bulk of deliveries.
“We manually tag medications five days per week, (applying) 500 tags per day,” said Wenger. “This takes two to three hours per day” and costs the hospital around $8,000 per month. A heavy lift, but Wegner says the ROI is worth the cost. “If our pharmacy technicians did not have to tag medications, I could cut the hours needed for this shift and re-deploy them to help in other areas."
Wegner’s technicians aren’t alone in their struggle to do more with less.
“Hospitals are overwhelmed with resource challenges and burnout,” explained Gwen Volpe, senior director of medication technology programs and strategic partnerships at Fresenius Kabi. “Manually tagging medication is a labor-intensive process, so the more medications we can provide pre-tagged for our customers, the more they can focus on what’s important — patient care.”
Manually tagging medication is a labor-intensive process, so the more medications we can provide pre-tagged for our customers, the more they can focus on what’s important — patient care.
Adding RAIN at the speed of manufacturing
Here’s how Fresenius Kabi’s +RFID pre-tagging system works:
- RAIN RFID-based inlays containing Impinj M780 endpoint ICs are encoded with a medication's GS1 Global Trade Item Number and serial number and embedded into drug labels by Impinj tag partner CCL eAgile. These RAIN RFID labels are then delivered to the Fresenius Kabi manufacturing facility.
- At Fresenius Kabi’s manufacturing facility, the RAIN RFID labels are applied to the medication containers and encoded with additional information: the medication’s lot number and expiration date.
- As the RFID-labeled medication products move through Fresenius Kabi's manufacturing line, Impinj R700 RAIN RFID readers read the tags, verifying their data and ensuring the tags are fully validated before they are boxed and shipped to hospital pharmacies.
- Once the tagged medications arrive at their destination, staff members can immediately take inventory, stock shelves and assemble medication trays and carts in operating rooms and procedural rooms — without having to manually apply RAIN labels.
At the hospital, staff can now use fixed readers or handheld RAIN RFID readers to surface the medications’ data in seconds. RAIN’s forensic-level tracking capabilities allow hospitals to:
- Closely monitor drug inventory levels so orders are placed only for what’s needed
- Remove medications nearing expiration
- Quickly find and remove recalled items
Peak performance from Impinj and CCL eAgile
When Fresenius Kabi was looking for a tag and label vendor for its +RFID products, they reached out to Impinj partner CCL eAgile. Because of the physical nature of vials and syringes, RAIN RFID tags had to be small, adhere to glass, and still perform even in the presence of liquids and metal. CCL eAgile delivered.
“They understood that a one-size-fits-all RFID tag would not meet our performance requirements, so they designed inlays based on the properties of our injectable drugs and their containers,” said Volpe. “They demonstrated the entire process of inlay design, testing, manufacturing, label conversion, validation, storage, and shipment, as well as the hardware and software needed to integrate with our internal systems.”
An inaccurate or missed tag read in a healthcare environment could delay procedures and even threaten the care of a patient, so the tag had to perform flawlessly. CCL eAgile turned to Impinj.
“We found the Impinj M780 to be an ideal choice due to its enhanced read sensitivity and expanded EPC memory,” said Mike Isabell, CCL eAgile’s principal engineer, RFID and quality. The CCL eAgile team also appreciated the Impinj AutoTune feature, which automatically tunes a chip during operation, maximizing the power it receives and improving tag performance in challenging read environments. “Our experience with Impinj has been outstanding, from the high level of service to the quality of their products.”
The future of RFID-tagged medications
Fresenius Kabi started adding +RFID labels to Diprivan in 2020 and today offers 19 +RFID medications, with more planned.
Read more about how the Impinj platform can help healthcare organizations improve patient care, reduce costs, and increase efficiencies with RAIN RFID.
- Article tagged as:
Monday, June 23, 2025
ABOUT THE CUSTOMER
Fresenius Kabi
Fresenius Kabi is a global healthcare company that specializes in medicines and technologies for infusion, transfusion, and clinical nutrition.
ABOUT THE PARTNER
Sign Up for the latest news