Last week, the Japan Diet, the bicameral legislature, enacted a bill that amends the Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices (PMD) Law there. From the limited information I have seen from GS1 Healthcare and from online articles I found through Google, it appears that one of the many things the new bill does is add a new barcoding mandate. Previously, barcoding of medicines and medical devices in Japan was only recommended.
Continue reading Japan Moves To Mandate Barcodes For Drug Traceability
We’ve seen this sequence of events before in China, Brazil, and India, and now they may be happening in the Russian Federation. The government issues regulatory requirements mandating pharma serialization and tracing with crazy-aggressive deadlines and with confusing, sometimes illogical requirements. Amendments are issued, sometimes helping, sometimes making things worse. Then just before (or just after) the deadline, when confusion reigns, someone else in the government issues calls for rationality, and the government quickly folds their requirements, rethinks and retrenches. In China and Brazil it resulted in a full withdrawal and total redesign of their entire approach…and much more reasonable deadlines. So far in India it has mostly just resulted in pushing the deadline out, again and again, but even there, there are signs that some are proposing a complete withdrawal and redesign. So far in the Russian Federation, all we have is the posting of a set of very rational recommendations by a group of participants in parliamentary hearings of the State Duma Committee on Health Protection. Their hearings were apparently related to the spotty readiness of the government and industry and their report comes less than 3 months from the deadline for serialization and tracing of all drugs.
Continue reading Russia: Rationality Makes An Appearance at the 11th Hour. Will It Matter?
Last week GS1 US published their “2019 Update: Barcode Readability for DSCSA 2023 Interoperability” in conjunction with the Big 3 wholesale distributors, AmerisourceBergen, McKesson and Cardinal Health. You’ve probably already seen it, but probably not like this. Keep reading.
This year there was a significant jump in the percentage of drug products containing the 2D barcode mandated by the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA). The problem is, for the last three years they have published their data four to five months after they collected the data (see also “Wholesalers Find Troubling Results In DSCSA Barcode Assessment“). What everyone really wants to know is, what percentage of drugs would have been marked with the 2D barcode in November of 2018 and today, not back in June of those years. And with three years’ worth of data, you can make a reasonable extrapolation of the data for the November dates, if you just apply a little spreadsheet and graphics skills. Let’s try it.
Continue reading 2019 GS1 US Barcode Assessment, Extrapolated
Earlier this month the Russian Federation finally amended Decree #1556 to cut the length of the Signature portion of the crypto-code element of their pharmaceutical unique identifier in half. Will that solve the problems the industry uncovered, like the barcode taking up so much space and slow read performance? Let’s take a closer look at it, but first, a review.
Continue reading Russia Officially Cuts Length of Crypto-code in Half
Earlier this month Anvisa published an initial report on their drug traceability pilot as required by law there (see “Brazil Gets Rational With Their New Pharma Traceability Law” and “Brazil Publishes RDC-157 To Regulate 2017 3-Lot Pilot”). I finally had time to use Google Translate on that report. Google keeps improving their translation software and it is now to the point where I think the translation of this document is pretty good. I still don’t recommend you use it for compliance decisions, but it’s great for getting a preview of what the document—originally in Portuguese—says.
Continue reading Brazil: The Anvisa 2019 Pilot Report
Aggregation of saleable drug packages to shipping cases and pallets is not required by the US Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) or the EU Falsified Medicines Directive (FMD) or the related Delegated Regulation (EUDR). But certain business processes in the EU under the FMD will be difficult to accomplish without it, and after November 2023, the operation of the supply chain in the US will not be efficient without it (see “Aggregation: The Achilles’ Heel of Pharma Supply Chain Operation Under A Serialization Regulation”, “EU FMD: Aggregation Is Not Mandated, But It Will Be Necessary” and “Pharma Aggregation: How Companies Are Achieving Perfection Today”). Absent a mandate, companies need to recognize, themselves, just how vital aggregation is to their businesses and prepare to generate it and/or make use of it.
Continue reading An Aggregation ‘Discussion’
Last week, the Pharmaceutical Distribution Security Alliance (PDSA) published two papers aimed at kickstarting the creation of a new non-profit organization that would accept the responsibility for setting up and executing governance over Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) phase II interoperability (see “A Serious DSCSA Governance Organizational Proposal Emerges From PDSA”). PDSA defines “DSCSA phase II” to be the same as what the DSCSA text calls the “Enhanced Drug Distribution Security” (EDDS) phase (see “EDDS: The New Data Exchange Requirements”). The EDDS phase (err, Phase II of the DSCSA) starts on November 27, 2023. In most informal conversations this phase is usually just referred to as “2023”.
Continue reading PDSA’s Proposal for Governance of DSCSA Phase II Interoperability
The internet lit up last week on the publication of an official warning letter from Alonza Cruse, Director, Office of Pharmaceutical Quality Operations, Office of Regulatory Affairs, to John H. Hammergren, CEO of McKesson Corporation, for violations of the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA). I’ve written about this situation before, back when the original FDA 483, notice of “inspectional observations”, was originally published (see “McKesson’s DSCSA 483 Explained”), but this new letter provides many more details of the incidents that led to that original notice, including some details of McKesson’s follow-up communications regarding the situation.
Continue reading FDA Hammer Comes Down On McKesson For DSCSA ViolationsDISCLAIMER: RxTrace contains some of the personal thoughts, ideas and opinions of RxTrace. The material contained in RxTrace is not legal advice. The writers of RxTrace are not lawyers.
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