Patent ID: 8346632

Claim:
A medical item recall system for medical items at one or more medical facilities at which the medical items are consumed and/or distributed to patients, each of the medical items having stand-off readable tags, the system comprising: medical facilities storage devices at the one or more medical facilities containing medical items, the medical items being identified via the stand-off readable tags and associated with individual medical facilities storage devices, wherein the stand-off readable tags encode unique serial numbers that uniquely identify corresponding medical items, the medical facilities storage devices reading the stand-off readable tags and reporting the serial numbers read from the stand-off readable tags; and an inventory management system tracking each of the medical items according to the serial numbers of the stand-off readable tags, wherein the inventory management system receives recall information for the medical items, receives content information concerning the medical items contained in each of the medical facilities storage devices by receiving the serial numbers read by the medical facilities storage devices, searches an inventory database based on the recall information to determine locations of the medical items based on the reporting of the serial numbers from the stand-off readable tags by the medical facilities storage devices, and issues reports for locations in the medical facilities storage devices of medical items matching the recall information.