Healthcare Matters

I stumbled on a story posted in Phys.org  that promotes a USP Supply Chain Integrity workshop hosted May 22-23 in Rockville, Md. Something tells me that a new wave of conventions and workshops surrounding the topic of securing the pharmaceutical supply chain are going to be in vogue for quite some time.

What’s interesting about the upcoming USP convention is its stated focus on developing and enacting some common security practice –to be shared between the pharmaceuticals, regulatory authorities, lawmakers, providers and practitioners whose actions to date have shaped the problem that now needs to be solved.  Can you spell collaboration? There’s that word again.

Said Praveen Tyle, Ph.D., executive vice president and chief science officer for USP. “Legislative proposals circulating in Congress, continuing debate over product- versus lot-level tracking, gray markets growing in the face of drug shortages and other circumstances are converging, making it clear that the status quo is no longer adequate. Through this workshop, we hope to bring the different and sometimes disparate stakeholders together to find some common ground in addressing these difficult topics and to help determine a path forward on an overall approach to supply chain integrity.”

Here at Healthcare Matters, we recently covered the counterfeit Avastin case that continues to baffle the industry’s supply chain security experts.

The USP convention agenda is simple:

Current approaches have proven inadequate. Individual companies are beefing up and dedicating staff to secure their own supply chains –and while that’s fine—the opportunity for all the players in the supply chain to collaborate in the development of an enhanced standard covering the supply chain as a whole is much better approach. Indeed, a framework exists in draft form: Beyond quality management, this new standard would serve as a guide around importation practice, best practices to combat counterfeit drugs and medical devices, diversion and theft.

Supply chain professionals in the pharmaceutical industry have got their hands full trying to develop ways to integrate security. Sourcing optimization tools (a.k.a. collaborative sourcing tools) that support scenario planning are critical in this environment for at least two reasons: 1) Collaboration between all players in the supply chain is essential; 2) You need a way to model all of your potential options. Optimization tools that support scenario planning provide a way to empirically balance objectives and constraints with supplier capabilities –and understand the real ($) trade-off costs. In an fully loaded optimization model (supplier capabilities + buyer constraints) the cost of constraints becomes known through a series of “what if” scenario-based analyses. Put another way, it would allow those who are figuring it out to do it within the confines of realistic budget.

—Tom Finn