Pharmaceutical traceability – the most secure solutions

As you might expect, pharmaceutical traceability is of the utmost importance for everyone in the supply chain, and of course the end-user of the drugs who are expecting them to help, not hinder them. 

Unfortunately, counterfeit drugs are big business. They are extremely lucrative for the pirates who sell them, and they look almost exactly like the real thing in many cases which means a lot of vulnerable people end up being fooled by them

So serious, in fact, is re problem, that it is thought as many as 155,000 children of aloe die each year from consuming counterfeit medications, and that’s before we even get to the adults!

As a result, companies who are involved in the manufacture and sale of pharmaceuticals need to take pharma traceability very seriously, a failure to do so could not on,y damage their reputation and see their profits tank, but it could actually prove fatal!

What are the most secure solutions for pharma traceability?

Undoubtedly, the best way to beat the counterfeiters at their own game, and deal with other significant issues such as drugs being diverted from low-price regions to regions with higher prices, which can have significant legal ramifications for pharma companies, is to use a high tech pharma traceability technology.

In the past, it was not uncommon for pharma traceability to be as simple as including scratch away panels on the packaging, which would reveal a unique code when the panel was scraped off. As you can imagine, this was not an ideal solution because even unique codes can be copied by counterfeiters, and this is something that they did do, so where does that leave us? 

Blockchain authentication

It leaves us with blockchain pharma traceability solutions. What is blockchain? Blockchain is a digital ledger, in layman’s terms anyway, which can be used to record information in a sequence in such a way that it cannot be changed or used to cheat the system in any way.

All transactions that are logged are turned into blocks and each block will contain a number of pieces of data, all of which have been turned into a unique cryptographic which cannot be modified in any way. This will enable your company to keep track of your pharmaceutical products from manufacture to opening the box up and no one will be able to counterfeit it.

What’s more, you can use NFC product labels or sealed tags, which can be read by a smartphone, to seal packages and enable anyone with a smartphone and the right software to verify that your pharmaceuticals are 100 percent legit, while giving the counterfeiters a major headache because there is practically no way they will be able to do anything about it.  This kind of tech can even offer protection against fraudulent dilution ad refilling to protect the integrity of your product at all times!

Pharma traceability is not something you can mess around with, and the most secure option is almost certainly blockchain, so if you haven’t already implemented it in your business, you almost certainly should.