The figures are the hospital’s own, reported by the Korean healthcare paper Bokuen News on 11 November 2026. The hospital has issued no release of its own and the numbers are not independently audited.

Consigned stock is the hard case

The system covers consigned medical devices: high-value treatment materials and consumables a supplier delivers in advance so they are on hand for surgery and emergencies, but continues to own until they are used. The hospital holds the stock, the supplier holds the title, and neither party has reliable visibility of it. That is why consigned inventory is a recurring target for asset tracking projects.

Previously, suppliers delivered directly into each clinical department and the staff there tracked holdings and usage by hand. Some suppliers had already applied RFID to a limited range of their own items, but the hospital says this is the first time a Korean hospital has led a reorganisation of the whole logistics system for consigned devices rather than accepting what individual suppliers offered.

One goods-in point first, tags second

The most interesting operational change is not the tag. The hospital consolidated every delivery into a single in-hospital logistics centre, then digitised the process from goods-in through goods-out to stock management, tracking receipts, holdings, usage volume and expiry dates in real time. Supplier staff no longer walk a round of departments: the hospital says the time a supplier spends delivering has fallen from 40 minutes to under five, a saving of roughly 90%.

That one change carries the infection control benefit too: routing suppliers through the logistics centre rather than into clinical areas reduces the infection risk associated with outsiders entering those areas. Managing item data digitally also removes errors that creep into manual handling, and the system automatically screens out devices approaching their expiry date.

The stock count moved with it. Instead of every department counting its own holdings, the logistics centre runs one consolidated RFID count, a reduction the hospital puts at more than 80% of the time spent on stock management. It expects better stock visibility to cut unnecessary holdings and waste too, though it has published no figure for that.

Timeline, and the 87% caveat

The build followed a three-way agreement signed on 30 December 2025 between the hospital, Opera Salutaris and Online Pharm. Process improvement work began in January 2026, and after the RFID infrastructure was built and piloted, operation expanded from July 2026 to operating theatres and other key departments.

The hospital says 87% of the consigned devices currently in use that are capable of being digitised have now been digitised. The caveat is worth sitting with: the denominator is not the whole consigned estate, only the part the hospital judges taggable. Those remaining items are what cap how complete a single consolidated count can ever be, and neither their nature nor their number has been disclosed.

Who built it

Online Pharm, a pharmaceutical distribution affiliate of Korea’s Hanmi Science group, is the core technology partner, responsible for the system build and for running the RFID solution. The platform is its KEIDAS RFID Solution. The company says it has more than 15 years of RFID experience, having been first in its sector to give pharmacies real-time tracking of drug stock, ordering and expiry dates.

Opera Salutaris buys consigned devices and treatment materials for hospitals in the Catholic Medical Center group, the Catholic hospital network in Korea. It has run bulk consigned purchasing on the KEIDAS platform for more than three years with a set of domestic and overseas manufacturers, and the Eunpyeong agreement was the first extension of that to a hospital’s entire consigned stock. The plan set out in January 2026 was to start at Eunpyeong, then expand in sequence to the other Catholic Medical Center hospitals it buys for.

What is not on the record

Neither the hospital nor Online Pharm has published the frequency band, the tag type or the air-interface standard in use, and no reader, antenna or tag hardware supplier is named anywhere in the announcements. The coverage says only that the technology recognises many devices at once without contact, the advantage claimed over the manual and barcode-centred methods it replaces. Tag counts, the number of lines covered, the cost and the contract value are also unpublished.

“Smart and systematic goods management helps clinicians focus fully on treating patients, and is a core foundation for strengthening patient safety and infection control,” said Bae Si-hyeon, director of Eunpyeong St. Mary’s Hospital.

Bae said the hospital would expand the system to every department on the basis of the pilot results. It sits alongside other technology work at the site, including a project with Hyundai Motor Group’s Robotics Lab on goods delivery, patient rehabilitation and musculoskeletal injury prevention. More deployments of this kind are collected in our healthcare coverage.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.