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Multi-Stakeholder Traceability System Ensuring Efficiency in Healthcare Supply Chain Management Amidst COVID Crisis

 The way COVID-19 impacted the world, altered every projection made by Deloitte or McKinsey for the Healthcare supply chain. While the world economy came to an almost halt due to the pandemic, the healthcare supply chain faced unprecedented challenges that are continuing to date. A spike in requirements for essentials medicines and personal protective equipment (PPE) appeared, while the major supplying country for the same dealt with controlling the pandemic. The sudden emergence of a novel virus infection without a cure created a dire need for a vaccine to save the patients. COVID-19 wasn’t a nation-wide tragedy, but a global disaster with no cure or preparations, and the chaos followed worldwide.

Apart from the lack of essential medicines and PPEs kits, another major challenge for the healthcare industry is the invention of the COVID vaccine, followed by its distribution to the world. With the creation of the vaccine, its counterfeit products will appear in the market, adding detection and prevention of such products to the issues to be dealt with. As per the data of Europol, law enforcement seized 34,000 counterfeit medical supplies in a span of 8 days, along with over 4.4 million fake pharma products worth $ 14 million.

Drug counterfeit is a nightmare for the healthcare industry as it results in the death of over 2,50,000 children every year and more. In such a scenario, there is a dire need for a universal traceable system to ensure and maintain the sanctity of healthcare.

Traceability in simple terms is the ability to identify, track and trace elements on the move from their raw form to finished products. Adding the ‘end-to-end’ to traceability means their identification, tracking and tracing from their production to their completion of the cycle, i.e. reaching the end consumer. To simplify it even further, traceability enables tracking a product, from who made it, who handled it and where it is right now.

As mentioned above, the global healthcare system is crippled by various challenges, directly or indirectly affecting the world at large, and needs to be addressed, creating the need for a traceability system to address the pain areas and fix the healthcare supply chain. The major challenges being,

  • Entering and circulation of counterfeit products in the market
  • Silos between multiple stakeholders resulting in losses
  • Product recall
  • Opacity during transit

Enabling a multi-stakeholder traceability system can ensure the efficiency of the said supply chain. It can:

  • Detect counterfeit through a standard space traceability solution
  • Simplify drug recall process through tracking
  • Seamless sharing of information between stakeholders
  • Strengthen inventory management through traceability of shipped essentials during transit and directing essentials as required
  • Increased production efficiency through real-time inventory management

GS1 offers a robust healthcare traceability system to eliminate counterfeit healthcare products, enabling companies to comply with the regulations and enhance patient safety. It has built a process standard, the Global Traceability Standard for Healthcare (GTSH), that facilitates multi-stakeholder operations to function on a universal framework and make the process efficient. Further, the EPCIS standard by GS1 enables all the stakeholders to share information about the whereabouts of the drugs, medical devices, and assets through the supply chain. 

GS1 traceability can ensure efficiency in Healthcare supply chain management by addressing all the major pain areas of the industry. GS1 standards provide the common foundation for businesses to streamline their processes and achieve superior traceability of their products throughout the supply chain. With the provision of a unique barcode number, a product can be identified worldwide and its origin can be traced back to its manufacturer, along with other details.

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