E-Health Europe’s Jon Hoeksma has written a fascinating article about European Commission proposals to introduce bar codes to help crack down on counterfeit drugs, with the aim to use technology to enable “total traceability” of all medicines bought in pharmacies or online.
Gunter Verheugen, the EU industry commissioner responsible for the ‘pharmaceutical package’ said the measures were needed to address the growing problem of counterfeit drugs, and will coincide with the introduction of a part of a package of measures that will also allow drug manufacturers to promote information about their prescription-only products directly to EU consumers (DTC) for the first time.
This package is designed to give patients access to centralized EU clinical information on the side effects of drugs and will set a EU Code of Conduct that will tighten up the rules governing advertising of pharmaceuticals.
It’s a shame they aren’t considering the potential for QR Codes which would have several significant benefits over bar codes including:
> Enables end user authentication of product (imperative for the increasing numbers of medicines being bought online)
> Much greater access through use of patient owned conventional mobile
> Same basic technology and costs to bar codes eg. software, printing etc
> Direct opportunity to provide personalised information along with drug eg. use with interactive questionnaires could help identify patient specific risks/side effects
> By opening a direct two way communication channel with patients, adverse incident reports could be picked up quickly
> As a connected solution they could be activated (eg. at point of sale) and deactivated (eg. expiry)
