Tag Archives: expiry

EUDA

The ‘Unique Identifier’ in the EU Delegated Act

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The European Commission published a discussion draft of the European Union Delegated Act (EUDA) about two weeks ago (See “Breaking News: The EC Has Published The Delegated Act“).  The EUDA was called for in the Falsified Medicines Directive (FMD) back in 2011 and is primarily intended to define the “safety features” that must appear on most drugs three years after it is finalized.  Assuming it gets finalized around the end of 2015, that means that manufacturers and repackagers targeting the European pharmaceutical market will need to begin placing the specified safety features on their drug packages near the end of 2018.  EU Member States who already have an operational drug tracing law, like Italy and a few others, get an additional six years for companies to switch to the FMD and EUDA on drugs distributed there.

There are a lot of details Continue reading The ‘Unique Identifier’ in the EU Delegated Act →

SNI

SNI’s Are Not Enough In a Plateau-Based Supply Chain Security Approach

I recently published an essay on RxTrace called “Plateaus of Pharma Supply Chain Security” in which I proposed that a better timeline for the introduction of technology to secure the U.S. pharmaceutical supply chain was one based on plateaus.  Each succeeding plateau would add the adoption of new technology and/or data communications among the participants in the supply chain with the intent of elevating the security over the previous plateau.

In that essay I included illustrative dates for each of the four plateaus that I offered as an example of the concept, but you could easily imagine the overall program having open-ended dates that would allow the supply chain to adopt one plateau at a time and move to the next plateau only if/when a security problem is discovered at the current plateau.  That is, jump to the next plateau only when necessary.  Taking this approach, you may never actually need to get to the later plateaus.

For example, imagine that the first plateau were for manufacturers to serialize all drugs at the pharmacy-saleable package level (what I normally call “unit-level”) with an FDA Standardized Numeric Identifier (SNI) and all supply chain owners of drugs were to read the SNI’s and simply keep records of who they bought them from and who they sold them to.

With no data communications between trading partners that includes the SNI’s it might seem that little
security has been gained over what is done today.  But this small step (“small” compared to a full pedigree or track & trace system) would allow criminal Continue reading SNI’s Are Not Enough In a Plateau-Based Supply Chain Security Approach →