Counterfeit drugs are killing over million people every year. As per WHO, depending upon the country, 25-40% medicines in the market are counterfeit. Every year the industry loses more than $200 billion in revenue. With supply chain gaps in terms of full track & traceability and new business models emerging – e.g. online pharmacy, online pharma aggregators – the problem is becoming bigger.
Drug Supply Chain Safety Act (DSCSA) intends to ensure that every pharmaceutical item dispensed to a patient has a known path that is traceable through the supply chain. However, it has to overcome the challenges such as how the advanced serialisation can be implemented and how the track & trace data be captured in a standardised way across countries and continents?
The manufacturers and other participants of the network are faced with the challenges of increasing cost of anti-counterfeiting technologies and how they can trust the technology to protect it from counterfeiting, increase its revenue and protect its brand?
To meet the DSCSA requirements and address manufacturers concerns, we need a solution that can be trusted, follows standard and is not expensive. realmeds is world’s first Blockchain, AI & IoT based solution for drugs that offers full real-time track & traceability with GS1 compliance. It is developed by PIPRA Solutions. With advanced serialization method, elaborate AI driven validation checks, trustful network, IoT based sensitive medicine monitoring and secure data, realmeds offers everything that a modern track & traceability system needs.
Figure 1: realmeds key components
As PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) realmeds provides a secure, trustful and single Blockchain network for all supply chain participants so that drugs can move across states, countries and continents without any friction or dilution. Blockchain along with AI creates a unbreakable supply chain that a fake drug manufacturer cannot get into, single ownership of the drug can be established, and a guilty participant can be identified accurately – in real-time. Platform also offers IoT integration for further enrich its validation of temperature/humidity sensitive drugs.
The serialization code generated from realmeds is GS1 compliant. Though FDA has not mandated GS1 as the supply chain standard but GS1 has been a preferred standard among the drug manufacturers. GS1 is a very elaborate standard and may be a time and cost consuming activity to implement. However, with time, this will become a mandatory aspect of drug manufacturing. realmeds platform is fully GS1 compliant and its serialization code is interoperable. Here is the complete list of realmeds key features:
realmeds hides all the complexities in its platform and offers two simple mobile applications – one for the consumer/buyer and one for all the other supply chain participants. The mobile app allows its user to scan the serialization code, get that validated and look at the provenance information. As the serialisation codes are validated the incidents are reported, in real-time, to the dashboard which offers various insightful visuals to the manufacturers, government agencies, and public.
Figure 2: realmeds Dashboard and mobile app
With its well-thought architecture, features, capability to integrate with existing workflows/systems, and support for standards, realmeds can bring down counterfeiting to 0% and offer tangible (e.g. revenue growth, saving on legal cost) and intangible (e.g. increased brand value) benefits to each one of its participants. The following table highlights the benefits that major supply chain participants have with realmeds:
Industry has been fighting counterfeiting for multiple decades. However, today, for the first time, we have technologies that have the potential to solve this problem and save millions of lives every year. Technologies like Blockchain, AI, IoT, Digital Twin, and Nanotechnology offer capabilities that, when combined properly, can offer a solution. realmeds is based on this insight. It employs various technologies to fight the menace called counterfeiting. And, with PIPRA Solutions’ decade of expertise in building large scale applications, the architecture and design principles have been put in place such that any size manufacturer finds realmeds cost effective and trustful platform to implement their track and traceability needs. And with GS1 compliance, it opens up the export doors for their business.