CAMBRIDGE, England,
May 24, 2015 /PRNewswire/ --
EU Falsified Medicines Directive –
When benchmarking for expertise and experience in operating a
Medicine Verification Service, look for EU Member States who have a
fully operational system in place, not a pilot. Pick an Aegate
country: for example BELGIUM
The Falsified Medicines Directive (FMD) is a new EU-wide
legislation being introduced to protect patients from counterfeit
medicines. The FMD requires all 28 Member States to have a system
in place to detect falsified medicines: uniquely serialised
medicine packs, tamper-proof seals and their authenticity verified
before being dispensed to patients.
The scale of the challenge is considerable and will be mandated
by law. Over 6,000 pharmaceutical manufacturers must serialise and
add tamper proofing to roughly 10 billion packs of prescription
medicines that are dispensed every year across Europe.
On top of this, some 175,000 retail pharmacies and thousands of
other dispensing points in all 28 Member States must have a system
to verify the authenticity of medicines. Wholesalers must also have
a system in place to check medicines on a risk-based approach.
The system has to be in local languages, and fully operational
by the end of 2018.
Stakeholders in each Member State will have an important
decision to make on who to appoint as their local service
provider.
A leading example is the Aegate system, which has been in
operation in Belgium, Greece and Italy scanning serialised codes since 2007, as
well as The Netherlands and the UK
in 2015 - it is now operational in over 18,000 dispensing points.
In this time, the system has scanned over 3.3 billion medicine
packs from branded and generics manufacturers, and flagged up over
2.4 million potential issues to safeguard patients.
A comparison between the existing operational Aegate National
System for stakeholders in Europe,
and the securPharm pilot in Germany, shows the difference in scale and
capability to which the system provider needs to be prepared to
support individual countries at a local level:
German
Aegate National SecurPharm
Benchmark Criteria Stakeholder System Pilot
Operational Countries 3 1 pilot
Medicine verifications requests 3.3 Billion 15.2 Million
Pharmaceutical products 2,754 179
Pharmaceutical manufacturers
represented 92 25
Participating pharmacies 15,595 387
At least 500
ms: made up of
230 ms verification
180 ms total round and 270 ms
Message delivery time [Belgium] trip time delivery
(Photo:
http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150524/747169 )
An experienced, trusted service provider is needed in every
country - Aegate are ready now for deployment throughout
Europe.
About Aegate
With a documented history of some 3.3 billion medicines scanned
to date with an average rate of 200,000 transactions per hour
across 18,000 dispensing points, Aegate is the principal active
market leader in medicines verification. Aegate's Reach, Assure and
Protect services meets the needs of all stakeholders. Supported
internationally by manufacturers and pharmacists alike, Aegate is a
European company with offices throughout Europe. Our mission is to protect patients
from falsified, recalled or expired medicines.
We operate a highly secure real‐time system to verify the
authenticity of medicines. This operates seamlessly from
manufacturer to pharmacy, and fully meets the requirements of
European legislation for falsified medicines. The Aegate network
also supports messaging services that provide additional
information for the pharmacist at the point of dispense, such as
regulatory or drug safety advice and patient education or adherence
information.
For more information on Aegate, please visit
http://www.aegate.com
Media contact information:
Miriam Foster
Head of Marketing & Communications
Miriam.Foster@aegate.com
T: +44-1763-268160
W: http://www.aegate.com