How RFID is Reshaping Health and Wellness Supply Chains: Q&A with Suresh Palliparambil

Pharmaceutical Executive previously spoke with Deepak Prakash about how RFID tracking embeds are changing clinical trials. According to him, this technology allows for continuous monitoring and faster handling.

Recently, Pharmaceutical Executive spoke with Suresh Palliparambil about how this technology is being implemented for OTC situations. According to Impinj’s SVP of marketing and market development, advancements in the tracking technology allow the industry to tag products that were once considered untaggable.

According to him, this allows for greater visibility across the supply chain as it moves through its various checkpoints. This is an effect he refers to as full item-level transparency.

Pharmaceutical Executive: Can you describe true item-level visibility and its importance?
Suresh Palliparambil: True item-level visibility goes beyond general inventory tracking. It’s being able to see and understand at the item level exactly what an item is, whether it is authentic and where it is at any given moment in time. This allows supply chain managers to uniquely identify, locate and track every item beyond just a SKU or pallet in real time across various stages in the supply chain and within retail stores. This granular visibility and tracking enables more proactive product verification, expiration date monitoring and management, inventory management, loss prevention, counterfeit protection, gray-market (diversion) and the ability to quickly respond to product recalls if and when they occur. It also enables frictionless experiences such as self-checkout within retail stores. Item-level data also supports supply chain automation, which is critical as AI initiatives become a priority. Accurate and reliable data is essential to provide leaders with the right information to power these systems.

PE:What new advances in chip sensitivity have improved true item-level visibility?
Palliparambil: Innovations like Gen2X, released in December 2024 and now widely available across the RAIN industry, have bolstered capabilities around item-level visibility by improving how reliably, quickly and accurately individual RAIN RFID tags can be read, even in harsh environments. Gen2X is a standards-compatible enhancement to the RAIN RFID radio protocol that speeds inventory, improves reader sensitivity and range and enhances read- zone confinement. These advancements make it easier to accurately read items that are small, embedded or densely packed, while reducing stray reads and communication errors. They also enable more precise tag filtering so that only relevant items respond during inventory. These capabilities shorten inventory counting time, reduce labor costs, enhance logistics management, ensure items are sold before they expire or removed from shelves after expiration, support loss prevention and help reduce item counterfeiting – all of which contribute to more precise and scalable item-level visibility.

PE: How does this uniquely impact OTC and pharmacy suppliers?
Palliparambil: OTC and pharmacy products are some of the hardest to track within supply chains. Items or medications containing liquids, metallic packaging and small form factors have historically made it difficult to achieve reliable, item-level visibility due to read sensitivity challenges. However, advancements in RAIN RFID, including improved endpoint IC sensitivity and standards-based enhancements like Gen2X, have significantly improved the ability to consistently read smaller, more challenging items with high accuracy. This enables reliable tagging and reading of products that were previously difficult to track, including small, liquid-filled or foil-based pharmaceutical items. This allows pharmacy suppliers to gain precise, item-level visibility across manufacturing, distribution and retail environments while also enabling medication management, compliance tracking and stronger expiration control of critical OTC and pharmacy products. In healthcare settings, this level of accuracy is directly tied to patient safety outcomes, helping ensure the right medication is available, authentic and used appropriately.

PE: How are technological advancements impacting retailer expectations?
Palliparambil: Tagging OTC and pharma products with RAIN RFID to gain item-level visibility helps to reduce stockouts, rotate items near expiration or remove expired inventory, improve inventory accuracy and improve the traceability and management of recalls. This ensures that critical medications and OTC products are available to patients and consumers when they are needed and can also help give accurate insights into when an item will be available to them.

Another added benefit of RAIN RFID is the ability to enable automated self-checkouts and eliminate the need for manual scanning or removal of hard security tags – ultimately providing consumers with greater convenience and flexibility for over-the-counter items.

PE: How will this impact issues with out-of-stocks on critical wellness items?
Palliparambil: Greater item-level visibility allows suppliers to more accurately manage and forecast inventory so that critical wellness items remain stocked on shelves and available to consumers. That same visibility extends across channels so retailers can see exactly what’s on hand in the store, in the backroom overflow and what is moving through the distribution network in real time.

This allows them to better fulfill in-store and online orders, reducing mismatches between both sale points and preventing stockouts that frustrate customers. For products like medications and supplements where reliable supply chains affect health outcomes, the end-to-end omnichannel accuracy is not just for better efficiency, it supports patient wellness.

Impinj’s Supply Chain Integrity Outlook 2026 report found that social media and influencer trends drove 42% of purchases last year, creating unpredictable spikes in demand. Even small changes in consumer demand cause larger demand swings higher up the chain with wholesalers, distributors and manufacturers. As a result, half of supply chain leaders struggled to keep up, and 52% said rapid demand shifts—and the bullwhip effects that can follow those shifts—were the biggest threat to supply chain reliability. With greater visibility into supply chains enabled by RAIN RFID, suppliers can more easily respond to these fluctuations and other supply chain disruptions––ultimately reducing out-of-stocks and ensuring availability.