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Serialization as a Bridge Between Life Sciences and Healthcare
has seen a significant return on investment (ROI) from the SAP solution. These healthcare. It can be envisioned that leading pharmaceutical companies
returns include fewer errors of medication (including errors in ordering, will continue to collaborate with innovative hospitals to allow serialization
prescribing, dispensing, and transcribing), lower adverse drug events (ADEs), of life-saving drugs for many different indications, and therefore permit
track and trace from the plant to the pharmacy and even to the bedside,
all the while maintaining compliance with standards from GS1 and EPCIS.
While this vision has yet to be realized in its entirety, early successes
anticipate that significant complementary benefits will accrue for
There are a number of benefits to taking
pharmaceutical and healthcare firms intent on reaching out to each other.
a holistic approach to serialization and Such benefits include ensuring higher levels of patient safety, reducing
medication errors, and restricting or even eliminating counterfeits and
track and trace.
diversions. There is potentially a win–win–win scenario for all of the key
Serialization and track-and-trace
higher levels of patient safety, and lower costs of treatment—partly as a result
technologies have the potential to
of fewer medication errors and ADEs. Moreover, there is the opportunity to use
significantly lower errors with medication,
the new RFID and serialization capabilities to further medical expertise. As there
is anonymous documentation of drugs administered to patients, it may be
reduce associated adverse drug events,
possible to discover correlations between disease patterns and potential drug
improve levels of patient safety, and
incompatibilities, enabling medical staff to better determine effective
treatments and investigate alternatives.
ensure medication compliance.
Summary and Conclusions stakeholders in the healthcare value chain, with the potential to mitigate
There are clearly potential synergies and significant benefits to be derived the life-threatening risks presented by counterfeiting, diversions, and
from ‘bridging this chasm’ between life sciences research and front-line medication errors that are a harsh reality today. n
PHARMACEUTICAL SERIALIZATION & AUTHENTICATION
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