Healthcare Matters

Pharmaceutical industry concern over counterfeiting, diversion, mishandling, mislabeling, and unintended or mistaken administration of prescription drugs continues to mount, but like most other “industry concerns,” fixing the problem has remained an academic discussion for far too long (i.e. for all but the classic early adopters). There is reason for hope. The times do seem to be changing. The availability of proven track and trace solutions along with shared provider and supplier concerns over product security, liability expense, regulatory pressures,  etc., are converging to drive a recent surge in adoption –and the most recent adopters aren’t grumbling. Instead, they’re wondering how they ever got along without it.

Consider these statistics:

• Counterfeit drug sales exceeded $75 billion worldwide in 2010, an increase of more than 90% over 2005 levels.
• The pharmaceutical industry handles $2 billion in returns annually.
• Preventable adverse drug events occur in up to 10% of hospital admissions. 770,000 patients are injured and 7,000 patients die each year due to medication errors.
• The additional cost associated with treating medical errors is high—estimated at $4,700 per patient.

It is any wonder then that Thomas Lobo, Pfizer’s Director of Global External Supply (Asia-India) recently said the following? “The greatest concern today in supply chain within the pharmaceutical industry is the lack of visibility across the transportation chain especially for air shipments.”

Combining encoded lot numbers, expiration dates and other variable data on different packaging levels creates a secure foundation for a variety of track-and-trace applications. And as a Zebra Technologies spokesperson assured: “coding and reading techniques can connect the information required for enterprise systems, supply chain operations and compliance responsibilities, while providing complete traceability from production to patient.” In other words, these systems aren’t standalone; they add value and provide a completely new and vital dimension to existing ERP and other operational systems. They aren’t plug and play, but implementations are relatively low risk.

Stakeholders at all critical junctures of the pharmaceutical supply chain – from point of production to point of care— are starting, thank goodness, to figure it out. When the pet food industry is better situated to handle recalls than a big portion of the pharma and medical device industries, well, fixing the problem leap frogs “industry concerns” and it becomes a matter of public interest. And all of this despite the fact that traceability not only contributes to product safety and security, but it pays for itself by enabling all sorts of needed efficiencies in inventory control and other related operational areas on both the supply- and demand side.

—Tom Finn