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News
Gareth Carpenter
5 Oct 2021

Pharmapack 2021: Traceability of medicines can transform pharma supply chain, delegates told

Traceability of medicines can help to reduce the negative effects to pharmaceutical supply chains of counterfeit medicines, medication errors and drug shortages, Nathalie Wardé-Dunoyer, CEO & Founder of Swiss start-up, D4P pharma told the Pharmapack Europe 2021 online conference Tuesday.

“Digital health has huge potential to transform our pharmaceutical supply chain, which is currently not based on actual patient demand,” she told the conference. “With full end-to-end digitalisation – a full along-the-product supply chain up to the patient will enable us to understand the actual needs of the patients. It’s going to improve our efficiency because we’ll have knowledge of actual consumption and demand, so we can reduce waste and also potentially shortages.”

Ms Wardé-Dunoyer said that whereas the industry had spent the last ten years focusing on product safety and improving security of B2B transactions, it was now intent on improving patient safety.

“In the future, we’ll have to focus on full digitalisation, which means an e-supply chain; a transformation of our digitalisation life for the benefit of all healthcare stakeholders,” she said.

She said counterfeit medicines are killing more than 1 million people per year globally, with emerging markets proving to be the biggest problem area with over 30% of marketed drugs falsified.

“Medication errors cost at least 1% of total health spend and 47% of them could be avoided because they are usually due to mistakes during the administration and dispensing process,” she added.