Tag Archives: EPCIS

DQSA of 2013

DQSA: Will U.S. Pharma Distributors Mandate Aggregation Data In Phase 1?

November 22, 2013 Dirk Rodgers 13 Comments

I attended the Healthcare Distribution Management Association (HDMA) Track and Trace Seminar held in Crystal City, VA on November 11-13, 2013. I was particularly interested in the session called “Distributor Case Studies and Updates”, as were a lot of other people. The speakers were:

Chris J. Anderson, Director, Quality Systems, Cardinal Health, Inc.
Steve Tadevich, Director, Product Serialization Technologies, McKesson Corporation
Heather Zenk, PharmD, Vice President, Business Integration, AmerisourceBergen Corporation

Each speaker gave a brief presentation about their current serialization and pedigree programs before taking questions as a panel. As you would expect, all of the preparation these companies have done up to this point has been aimed squarely at the California pedigree law which would have gone into effect for wholesalers in California in mid-2016. But, Continue reading DQSA: Will U.S. Pharma Distributors Mandate Aggregation Data In Phase 1? →

DQSA of 2013

DQSA: Getting To Electronic Transaction Data Exchange

November 21, 2013 Dirk Rodgers 6 Comments

While we wait for President Obama to sign the Drug Quality and Security Act of 2013 (DQSA, a.k.a. H.R. 3204) we can be confident it will become law in the next week or so. This President has been presented with over 740 bills so far in his Presidency and he has signed all but two. He has 10 days to sign the bill or it becomes law anyway but there might be some delay in the process between passage by the Senate and when the President is presented with the bill.

My interest in the DQSA of 2013 is only the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCS) which is Title II within the overall bill. I’m going to keep referring to it as the DQSA of 2013 but be aware that I probably won’t ever write about the compounding part, Title I. If that is what brought you here, sorry, look elsewhere.

It is not law yet, but we can now be 100% sure it will be very soon. Even before the bill was Continue reading DQSA: Getting To Electronic Transaction Data Exchange →

EPCIS

Will Use Of EPCIS Force Everyone To Use GS1 Identifiers?

October 14, 2013 Dirk Rodgers 3 Comments

Over the last five years the larger companies in the U.S. pharmaceutical supply chain have increasingly aligned around GS1’s Electronic Product Code Information Services (EPCIS) standard for holding and communicating serialization-based events. The hope and expectation by many of these manufactures and others in the supply chain is that EPCIS will be the standard that ensures supply-chain-wide interoperability in any future track and trace or ePedigree system that the federal government might impose. On its surface it appears that EPCIS is designed around GS1’s family of serialized identifiers, which are based on GS1’s GS1 Company Prefix (GCP) (see “Anatomy of a GTIN” and “Your GS1 Company Prefix: An Enterprise Resource“). This includes Continue reading Will Use Of EPCIS Force Everyone To Use GS1 Identifiers? →

California Pedigree Law, Federal Pedigree

California, Congress and The Choices We Are Forced To Face

October 7, 2013 Dirk Rodgers 11 Comments

Another week has gone by with no official movement in the Senate on the compromise pharmaceutical compounding and track & trace bill, H.R. 3204, the Drug Quality and Security Act (DQSA) (see “Waiting For The Senate To Act On A Track & Trace Bill, Again”). With the focus of the Congress rightly on reopening the government I think we should expect to wait a little longer. You can bet that the supporters and the opposition are both developing their strategy as time goes by.

I attended the GS1 Global Healthcare Conference in San Francisco last week and it was a great opportunity to reconnect with a lot of people I have worked with over the years on defining workable standards for healthcare supply chain data exchange. Some of us are Continue reading California, Congress and The Choices We Are Forced To Face →

UDI

What The UDI Date Format Says About FDA’s Direction

September 16, 2013 Dirk Rodgers 2 Comments

The U.S. FDA is poised to publish their final Unique Device Identification (UDI) rule any day now. The publication was due earlier in the summer but has apparently been held up in the review by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) without any kind of accurate timeline. The organizers of this year’s UDI Conference are hoping the FDA will be able to announce its publication at their event this Thursday and Friday in Baltimore. I understand that not everyone is looking forward to its publication, but some are kind of tired of waiting for it. I’ll bet Jay Crowley and his team Continue reading What The UDI Date Format Says About FDA’s Direction →

Location Identification

FDA Chooses DUNS For Unique Facility Identifier

September 9, 2013 Dirk Rodgers

Last week the FDA published draft, non-binding guidance for their recommended unique facility identifier (UFI) for use in registering foreign and domestic drug establishments. Last year, Congress passed the FDA Safety and Innovation Act (FDASIA) to address safety concerns induced by inspection gaps of facilities outside the United States and other issues (see “The Supply Chain Provisions Of The FDA Safety & Innovation Act”). In that law, Congress required the FDA to come up with some way of uniquely identifying all foreign and domestic facilities that are involved in the manufacture and importation of drugs. This new guidance is the response. Continue reading FDA Chooses DUNS For Unique Facility Identifier →

California Board of Pharmacy

Hey California Board of Pharmacy: Your Time Is Running Out!

June 26, 2013 Dirk Rodgers 2 Comments

The California Board of Pharmacy has begun to hold ePedigree-specific meetings with staff and a subset of the Board present. The first of these occurred on Monday of this week. The agenda was fairly long and promised action on a number of important topics, including the possibility that the Board would consider the use of EPCIS as a pedigree platform, inference, pedigree certifications and drop shipments. I came away disappointed that the only thing that happened was a brief discussion of each topic but seemingly no real action. It was almost as if the Board members and staff had made no progress on any of these topics since the March Enforcement Committee meeting. All that seemed to happen since that meeting Continue reading Hey California Board of Pharmacy: Your Time Is Running Out! →

California Pedigree Law

Falling Between The Cracks Of The California Pedigree Law

June 17, 2013 Dirk Rodgers 2 Comments

Most prescription pharmaceuticals distributed in California pass from manufacturer to pharmacy through wholesale distributors, but a small percentage are sold by the manufacturer directly to doctors and clinics. An even smaller percentage are sold through small companies licensed as kit manufacturers or distributors to dental offices, fire departments, ambulance companies and other carriers of emergency medical kits. These transactions are just as open to the introduction of illegitimate products as the larger transactions that we normally think of when we talk about the use of drug pedigrees, but because they are outside of the ordinary, they are at risk of falling between the cracks. That is, they might be a lot more complex, or not even possible, under the California pedigree law. Continue reading Falling Between The Cracks Of The California Pedigree Law →

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