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Tracking drugs through the supply chain — Medically Necessary

Watching the movement of prescription drugs

Medically Necessary is a podcast by Matt Blois about the health care supply chain — how we get drugs, devices and medical supplies to health care providers and patients.

This show is brought to you by Ryder, the only fully integrated logistics & transportation provider in the industry. Ryder’s solutions cover the entire supply chain including warehousing, transportation logistics, e-commerce fulfillment, & last mile. Discover how Ryder can make you ever better at ryder.com.

Many hospitals use radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags to track the location of expensive medical equipment or keep tabs on personal protective equipment supplies. But what is used when it comes to tracking prescription drugs?

On this episode of Medically Necessary, Matt Blois looks at how one company is working to bring that RFID technology to medicine distribution. RFID tracking company Impinj hopes to provide better visibility into health care supply chains.

RFID tags are tiny chips that can be attached to objects for quick and easy identification. These are the same tags you might implant in your dog so that it’ll be returned to you after escaping or chips inside a hotel key card to give you access to your room.


During the coronavirus pandemic, some hospitals implemented Impinj’s technology to track COVID-19 vaccines. Blois welcomes Sandy Murti, Impinj’s vice president of global partner development, to talk about that technology implementation.

You can find more Medically Necessary episodes and recaps for all our live podcasts here

Kaylee Nix

Kaylee Nix is a meteorologist and reporter for FreightWaves. She joined the company in November of 2020 after spending two years as a broadcast meteorologist for a local television channel in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Kaylee graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 2018 and immediately made the Tennessee Valley her home. Kaylee creates written summaries of FreightWaves live podcasts and cultivates the social media for FreightWaves TV.