The pharmaceutical industry in the U.S. is under the regulatory gun to bolster its ability to accurately track and trace the drugs it manufactures and ships to store shelves and healthcare facilities.
Those regulations include tracking medications that are returned by stores and healthcare facilities for resale.
Currently, the industry uses a patchwork of central databases based on the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) standard that features point-to-point connections between manufacturer and distributor; that system is costly and makes large-scale interoperability almost impossible. The central database approach is also cumbersome and leaves open the risk of diversion, counterfeit and a trust gap between siloed systems.
