EPCIS GUIDE for your organization

*NOTE – We are including a Free Trading Partner Integration template for you to download at the end of this article.

The 2023 DSCSA requirement looms in the near future and pharma companies are frantically working together to create and implement the technological goals that create the interoperable system by November 27, 2023. To achieve the three areas of interoperability as defined by the PDSA—exchange, verification, and tracing—these companies must also land on a common informational framework. 

In other words, to create a system that allows for the DSCSA vision of “fully interoperable, electronic tracing of products at the package level,” the industry needs to pick a common standard and use it throughout pharma. I discuss the challenges in my previous article: Drug Supply Chain Security Act, Phase II: Here’s what you MUST know.

Gary Lerner, the president at Gateway Checker Corporation, explained what it would take to make this happen. In short: “Capturing and exchanging information at this level of specificity requires a common information framework.”

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Impact of COVID-19 on DSCSA Implementation

Before the pandemic struck, the pharma industry was working feverishly to implement and enforce all the requirements of the DSCSA, especially the Phase II requirements scheduled for November of 2023. When COVID-19 dramatically changed the business landscape, the implementation became even more of an uphill battle, with both time and the pandemic acting as a cause of concern. 

In today’s post, we will look at COVID-19 and its impact on the DSCSA: from the FDA loosening some of the guidelines to the different areas of the DSCSA that are being impacted the most. If we can understand the relationship between these two, we can have a better grasp of realistic understandings and the best course of action moving forward.

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Why the FDA Extended The Saleable Returns Verification from 2020 to 2023

In 2020, most things did not go as planned. Considering the overwhelming impact of the worldwide pandemic, the pharmaceutical industry was far from immune to last year’s instability.

One of the major changes came with the Saleable Returns Verification’s extension. Despite being originally scheduled for a 2020 enactment, the FDA recently announced their plan to extend, yet again, the Saleable Returns Verification enforcement until 2023.

What does this really mean? Well the FDA won’t enforce it. So should you not care? It’s not that simple.

Legal liability

Remember, the law is the law. So the Saleable Returns Verifcation did become a requirement of the law this past November 27th 2020.

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