Bluesight and Pfizer Partner to Provide Source-Tagged RFID Medications to Hospital Pharmacies

Pfizer's SmartDose medications arrive pre-tagged and pre-associated for use with KitCheck, reducing manual tagging labor as part of RFID inventory management workflows

Bluesight, the leader in hospital intelligence solutions, today announced a partnership with Pfizer Global Hospital & Biosimilars to integrate SmartDose RFID-enabled medications with the KitCheck inventory management platform. Through the partnership, hospitals using KitCheck can procure SmartDose medications already tagged, encoded, and pre-associated at the point of manufacture.

An estimated one-third of U.S. hospitals now use RFID technology to improve inventory management efficiency, strengthen patient safety and regulatory compliance, and reduce medication waste associated with expirations. By moving tagging upstream to the point of manufacture, Pfizer is helping advance a standardized, interoperable approach that makes RFID easy for hospitals to adopt while preserving its efficiency, safety, and visibility benefits.

Through the partnership, Bluesight's engineers worked alongside Pfizer to ensure SmartDose was developed using industry best practices for RFID quality, interoperability, and downstream pharmacy workflows – including GS1 global data standards, ARC Spec S performance benchmarks, and specifications to assure tags of high integrity, accuracy, and performance.

"At Pfizer, we looked at the workflow hospitals were performing and asked a simple question: Why should pharmacists and pharmacy technicians be doing work that can be completed at the point of manufacture?" said Erin Pezant, Global Business Excellence Lead at Pfizer Global Hospital & Biosimilars. "SmartDose was designed to remove unnecessary manual steps from the pharmacy by delivering medications that arrive already tagged and associated. Hospitals receive the benefits of RFID while reducing their own tagging operations."

Unlike hospital-based tagging programs, SmartDose applies RFID labels during manufacturing using proven GS1 encoding strategies and rigorous quality assurance processes. Each vial undergoes individual, automated readback verification before release to confirm the tag is readable and correctly encoded - a first for source-tagged medications. These consistent manufacturing controls deliver a more reliable and accurate product, while reducing the complexity of hospital-managed tagging programs.