Introducing the UnitVisID Alliance
The first open, member-driven industry Alliance unifying the healthcare industry's approach for
interoperable radio-frequency identification (RFID)-tagged medications.
Members
The Alliance is made up of representatives from leading companies in the pharmaceutical ecosystem who developed a specification defining the use of RFID in the healthcare industry to ensure medications are tracked from manufacturing to patient use. Check out our current membership.
Benefits
Curious how membership in our alliance can help your organization solve workflow inefficiencies, accelerate time to market for your products, create better patient outcomes and so much more? Learn about our member types across the pharmaceutical supply chain.
Specifications
The members of the UnitVisID Alliance work together to create universal specifications for RFID tag usage in the medication tracking space to unify the healthcare industry around uniquely serialized, RFID-tagged pharmaceutical products. Learn more about our steps to ensure:
What is the UnitVisID Alliance?
The UnitVisID Alliance is the first open, member-driven Alliance established to unify the healthcare industry around a collective approach to serialized, RFID-tagged medications. Our goal is to ensure the accuracy, performance, and interoperability of RFID-tagged medications as they move through the supply chain from the manufacturer, through the distributor, to the hospital and eventually into the patient, across any and all hardware or software systems.
The UnitVisID approach takes serialization beyond DSCSA, from the unit of sale to the unit-of-use. The UnitVisID approach uniquely serializes every unit-of-use medication, container, or device and tracks every action taken upon it during its entire lifecycle.
UnitVisID RFID-tagged medications and hardware devices are compliant with existing standards like RAIN and GS1, and are tested to ensure:
- Performance — Use of only the best RFID inlay for the size, shape, material, and application environments
- Interoperability — Every medication and its unique attributes are read by all UnitVisID Certified hardware devices
- Accuracy — A full and evolving record of each medication's properties and event history are stored safely in the UnitVisID Registry cloud
UnitVisID Alliance was originally launched as the DoseID Consortium. We changed our name to better reflect our work around medication visibility and the benefits of that to hospitals and the supply chain.
Why was the UnitVisID Alliance created?
Despite huge investments by hospitals and healthcare organizations into automation solutions, many challenges remain - shortages, recalls, workflow inefficiencies and lack of interoperability. In recent years a variety of different RFID solutions have come into the healthcare market to track medications, instruments, and supplies without any industry-wide specifications having been established to ensure accuracy, performance, and interoperability between them. With industry-wide support of a comprehensive set of RFID specifications for healthcare, players along the pharmaceutical supply chain can now work together to solve these issues proactively rather than reactively.
We recognized the need to bring together the industry in a way that ensures RFID-tagged medications work in all downstream systems in hospitals and healthcare systems. This centralized backbone of data exchange, combined with a unified set of performance specifications, opens a world of interoperability that provides a complete and accurate history of each single unit dose medication that every industry participant can use. Furthermore, the UnitVisID Registry was created to provide a full and evolving record of each medication's components and event history securely stored in the cloud and available to all authorized parties anytime throughout the medication's entire lifecycle – from production all the way to patient use.
In addition, UnitVisID Alliance members supply more than 1,000 US hospitals and healthcare organizations with products and services. These include labels, inlays, trays, pre-tagged medications from pharmaceutical and 503B outsourcing facilities, and serialization services.
Today, more than 210 million RFID-tagged medications utilizing the UnitVisID platform have been scanned – exponentially more than any other RFID system in the US healthcare space. Most of these medications are registered in the UnitVisID Registry at the point of production by manufacturers.
The Alliance maintains the UnitVisID Specification with participation by representatives of hospitals, automation vendors, software vendors, and pharmaceutical manufacturer all working side-by-side to ensure an interoperable, high-performance future for RFID in the pharmaceutical industry and improved patient outcomes.