The Southworth PalletPal® Pallet Inverter is the fast, safe, economical way
to rotate pallet loads. The pressure-adjustable clamp secures loads up to
48" x 48" x 60" and weighing up to 4,400 lbs. and rotates them 180°.
The uses are endless…
• Transferring to or from in-house to shipping pallets or slip sheets
• Replacing damaged items at the bottom of a load
• Turning inventory for freshness
• Replacing broken pallets
For complete details, visit www.SouthworthProducts.com/inverter
making work faster, safer, and easier since 1890
TEL: (800) 743-1000 • FAX: (207) 797-4734
SouthworthProducts.com • salesinfo@SouthworthProducts.com
One Minute With No Manual Labor
®
16-041 Pallet Inverter Ad-DCV.indd 1 2/1/16 9: 42 AMwww.dcvelocity.com JUNE 2016 DC VELOCITY 47
ers to track pharmaceuticals and medical devices, fill orders quickly, support
cost-savings initiatives, improve inventory control, and reduce errors, he says.
“Effective inventory management
is critical within the healthcare supply
chain, and RFID technology is a powerful
tool for tracking, gaining visibility over
inventory, and overall building out a
more optimized, integrated warehousing
and distribution network,” Cannon says.
THE ROAD AHEAD
Despite the benefits of streamlining the
supply chain for high-value healthcare
products, the widespread adoption of
RFID is still hampered by the technology’s cost. RFID providers have made
progress on driving down costs in recent
years, but the solution is still too expensive to tag everyday items like bandages
when you add up the price of the chips,
software, hardware, and integration with
existing software platforms.
“Within healthcare, RFID has found
practical use for protecting high-value
products such as implantable medical
devices,” Cannon says. If improvements
in manufacturing and technology continue to make RFID cheaper, the technology
could spread much farther throughout
the healthcare sector.
One such avenue might arise from
the confluence of RFID technology with
an unexpected platform—smartphones.
An increasing number of smartphones
use wireless technology called near field
communications (NFC) to transmit payment data when waved near a target or
to exchange information when bumped
against another phone.
Since NFC uses the same wireless specification as high-frequency RFID tags, that
means millions of Americans will soon
be enabled with RFID readers in their
pockets, Cardinal Health’s Saghbini says.
This could have sweeping implications
for home health care, he adds.
For instance, patients with RFID-
scanning smartphones could monitor
turn, that could empower senior citi-
zens to live more years in their own
homes before moving to assisted-liv-
ing facilities.
Medical providers in many cor-
ners of the healthcare industry are
technology can provide a reliable
return on investment. From man-
ufacturers to warehouses and from
hospitals to homes, RFID adds visi-
bility to the healthcare supply chain
and could become an important tool
in empowering the sector to meet
the demands of practicing modern
medicine.
