AmerisourceBergen Corporation announced at the NACDS and HDMA RFID Healthcare Industry Adoption Summit being held this week in Washington, DC, an innovative Track and Trace Program that it believes will ultimately benefit the entire pharmaceutical supply channel.
AmerisourceBergen has been a leader in protecting the integrity of the pharmaceutical supply channel, first by pledging over one year ago to purchase 100 per cent of its pharmaceutical and other products directly from the product manufacturer, and now by launching a unique Track and Trace initiative which will utilize RFID and Electronic Product Code Information System (EPCIS) technology to track and trace products throughout the entire distribution process. AmerisourceBergen plans to formally launch the Track and Trace pilot program at its largest distribution centre in California by the end of 2006, a company release said.
In the pilot, AmerisourceBergen will use IBM's RFID middleware and embedded software on readers to read RFID tags currently used by certain pharmaceutical manufacturers as those products enter the distribution centre. The unique product ID from each RFID tag will be electronically stored in IBM's EPCIS, which will be the platform for secure electronic communications back to the product's manufacturer. This secure information exchange will allow AmerisourceBergen and its trading partners to work collaboratively to share transaction information and further secure the supply channel.
As new orders come into the AmerisourceBergen distribution centre, the RFID system can monitor product placed in shipping totes as they move through the picking, packing, and shipping processes. As each tote leaves the distribution centre the EPCIS software will record the time and location of each unit leaving the premises as well as its intended destination so that AmerisourceBergen has a complete record of the history of all RFID tagged drugs.
"The advantage of using the RFID and EPCIS system is that the information regarding the product's journey through the supply chain is stored in a manner that is useful for a number of different applications," said Shay Reid, AmerisourceBergen Vice President for Integrated Solutions. "Once the RFID tags have been read and the data has entered the EPCIS, the system can be queried to build a product pedigree for customers on demand, to provide real time receiving and shipping information to manufacturers as well as to more closely track both inventory and product demand."
"With IBM's extensive experience in designing and deploying RFID solutions, I can say that distributors like ABC will have a great advantage supporting customers through offering unique track and trace data," said Paul Chang, RFID/Pharma Executive, IBM Software Group. "And in an industry that lives depend on, IBM is providing the technology that will lead to a more efficient, safer, and more secure supply chain."
The next step in the pilot program will be to connect AmerisourceBergen's EPCIS directly to other business partner EPCIS systems and to select pharmaceutical manufacturer systems. In the first calendar quarter of 2007, VeriSign will provide services to support the deployment of technology and software necessary to enable AmerisourceBergen to communicate and authenticate transactions with its business partners while also providing the capability to query across multiple EPCIS systems.
Jeff Richards, vice president and general manager of VeriSign Intelligent Supply Chain Services stated, "AmerisourceBergen's innovative pilot will create unprecedented, direct electronic data connectivity to its trading partners. This level of data sharing and connectivity is a critical step towards allowing the pharmaceutical industry to trace the historical path of a particular product through the supply chain, which will add a level of security and efficiency to the pharmaceutical distribution process."
As AmerisourceBergen tests its Track and Trace pilot program, it intends to continue to supply electronic pedigrees in the state of Florida to those wholesale customers that require them under the state's current drug safety laws. Under the pedigree program, customers are charged fees that allow the Company to recover the cost of generating the pedigrees. The Company intends to offer its nationwide wholesale customers the same electronic pedigree program in support of the Prescription Drug Marketing Act (PDMA), which goes into full effect on December 1, 2006. The PDMA rule requires wholesalers who are not "authorized distributors of record" to provide a pedigree showing chain-of-ownership back to the manufacturer when selling the drugs to pharmacies.