Track and trace

摘要

With billions of prescription pills and tablets being packaged and shipped around the world each year, it would be easy to slip in a few tens of thousands of counterfeit pieces or divert a couple shipments of expensive medications to a black market in another country. The existing systems just haven't had the capacity to effectively track all products through the supply chain. This may be changing. Governments around the world are instituting regulations to manage counterfeiting, diversion and reimbursement fraud while improving manufacturing quality control. These rules and guidelines often require the printing and encoding of unique data that go right onto the package, causing pharmaceutical companies and contract packagers to scramble in order to meet all the requirements of every jurisdiction where they may be shipping their products. In effect, they are establishing an "electronic pedigree" for the prescription drugs. Many of these companies have little experience or understanding of how to build complex data structures that must be read and verified in the production process and then manage the massive amounts of data to effectively track the delivery of medications to the consumer and-if necessary-trace the product through the entire supply chain.