Blogs
January 9, 2026 / January 13, 2026 by Gina Breckenridge
RFID technology is no longer a niche experiment in healthcare—it’s rapidly becoming foundational, especially given the enhanced Drug Security Supply Chain Act (DSCSA) regulations that recently went into effect for drug manufacturers, dispensers, and trading partners. According to the 2025 State of Pharmacy Automation Update by Pharmacy Purchasing & Products, as of 2025, 34% of healthcare facilities use RFID to track medication inventory, up from just 15% in 2018 and 26% in 2022. According to this same report, nearly half (47%) of those without this technology plan to adopt it, and two-thirds (67%) of current RFID users plan to expand their utilization. That steady growth over nearly eight years signals something important: RFID isn’t a passing trend; it’s the future of critical medication and inventory management in health systems around the world.
Healthcare systems are facing unprecedented labor shortages and burnout, especially in central pharmacy. ASHP surveyed 10,000 pharmacists and found that nearly 60% of frontline pharmacist positions and 74% of entry-level pharmacy technician roles are understaffed.
And while labor shortages continue to be challenging, the pharmacy staff are also juggling administrative tasks that don’t allow them to practice at the top of their licensure as often as they’d like.
“We don’t want our time spent in inventory management. We want to spend time with the patient,” said David Aguero, PharmD, during a presentation at ASHP Midyear, Tagged for Success: Impactful Application and Future Opportunities of RFID Technology.
At the same time, highly trained pharmacists are increasingly pulled into manual, technician-level tasks. RFID helps close this gap by automating what machines do best—tracking, reading, counting, and documenting—so humans can focus on final verification, clinical judgment, and patient care.
This shift toward RFID adoption in pharmacies is already happening, with a focus on improving medication and inventory tracking. Here’s what we know from an RFID survey conducted by the ASHP Foundation:
For reference, RFID is typically used for up to 20% of medication inventory, but utilization is expanding. The number of facilities using RFID on more than 30% of their inventory doubled in 2025.
Historically, drug recalls and inventory audits have been reactive and painfully manual. RFID changes that equation. With item-level traceability—from pallet to carton to individual unit dose—health systems gain real-time visibility across the supply chain. The Axia Institute of Michigan conducted a two-part pilot on RAIN RFID for DSCSA compliance, which showed that RFID tags in healthcare identified 100% of medication errors in traceability workflows, dramatically improving drug recall response and DSCSA readiness.Crash carts, anesthesia carts, and narcotic vaults and carousels are seeing similar benefits. What once required hours of manual checks can now be done in minutes, with complete transparency and accountability. For example, kit and tray replenishment would typically take a pharmacy technician about 20 minutes to complete manually. With RFID, hundreds of medications can be scanned with unmatched accuracy, reducing replenishment time to about 2 minutes.
One of the biggest barriers to broader RFID adoption has been the lack of pre-tagged or source-tagged products.However, that is beginning to change. Manufacturers, distributors, and consignment medication programs (e.g., 340B programs) are increasingly offering pre-tagged medications using GS1 and interoperable standards. Without interoperability, RFID data becomes siloed, duplicative, and inefficient, which adds further strain to clinical workflows. With interoperability, RFID becomes a shared language that serves as the single source of truth across inventory systems, automation, EHRs, and clinical workflows—supporting everything from sterile compounding to anesthesia documentation to real-time tracking across points of care and remote storage sites.
The future of RFID extends far beyond inventory management. Emerging use cases include:
Regardless of setting, the goals of RFID utilization in pharmacies and across health systems are the same: reduce manual work, increase accuracy and visibility, and give clinicians their time back.
As RFID adoption increases, costs will continue to decline, making item-level tagging viable for more medication categories. But progress depends on demand. Pharmacists and healthcare leaders must continue to ask for interoperable, pre-tagged products from drug manufacturers and be willing to invest in the infrastructure that supports them. RFID should not be thought of as a single technology, but as a toolbelt—one that supports safer medication management, stronger compliance, and better patient care. The future isn’t about replacing humans; it’s about building systems that let them do what they do best. RFID is helping make that future possible.