Daniel Laverick is VP and Head of Digital & Data at Zuellig Pharma, one of the largest healthcare companies in Asia. Ahead of his session at Pharma IQ Live: Digital Supply Chain 2022, he describes how blockchain can improve visibility for pharmaceutical businesses and reduce the risk of counterfeit medications entering the supply chain.
Pharma Logistics IQ: What do you think are the main challenges pharmaceutical supply chains are facing right now?
Daniel Laverick: Even though we are now in an age of digital transformation, pharma supply chains continue to operate in silos. In Asia, serialization is not mandated in most countries. Each stage of the supply chain has its processes and non-standard product identifiers to manage products, which really inhibits data integration in terms of visibility and traceability.
The lack of end-to-end traceability and visibility of the supply chain brings a string of problems. Key to this is network capital locked up in supply chains. How do you optimize that? Then obviously making sure pharma products are stored in the proper conditions and handled in the right way, otherwise this can result in a significant loss of quality with a huge impact on patient safety. We have already seen this with the vaccines, how not storing them at the right temperature causes issues.
Counterfeit medication is a big problem in Asia. It is quite scary when you see the estimates in the region of US$200b in lost revenue, and that maybe three in 10 products are counterfeit in Southeast Asia alone.
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