'Teething troubles' hit Turkey's serialisation roll-out

Turkey's tracking system for medicines officially went live in more than 20,000 pharmacies on May 16, several months behind schedule, but there are already reports of serious problems with the system.

Some Turkish newspapers were claiming today that the ITS (Ilac Takip Sistemi) had been suspended until January 1, 2011. SecuringPharma.com was unable to verify this before this report went to press, however the Turkish Union of Pharmacists (TEB) put out a statement this afternoon indicating that the system was still in place.

The Association of Research-based Pharmaceutical Companies (AiFD) in Turkey says its own field testing suggests some of the scanners sold to pharmacies may be unable to read the new 2D datamatrix barcodes, which include a unique serialised identifier for each medicine pack.

In some cases, AiFD says, differences in readability were observed between pharmacies even for the same medicinal package, and in a statement it speculates that the algorithms used in the readers may not be sufficiently robust to give reliable results.

That is causing serious problems, according to pharmacists, who say they want to be able to return the unreadable medicine packs to the manufacturers in order to get a refund. Otherwise, they will be unable to get reimbursement for them and will be out of pocket. However, pharmaceutical manufacturers appear to be reluctant to accept these returns.

The ITS system, initially designed to prevent reimbursement fraud which is estimated to cost Turkey around $150m a year, is also being touted to prevent medicines counterfeiting and expired and recalled medicines from being dispensed.

It was originally due to come into force in 2009, but was held up by technical issues as well as political manoeuvring and opposition by pharmacists.

The Turkish Minister for Health, Recep Akdag, told the Cumhuriyet newspaper today that the scale of the project meant that it was understandable that there are teething problems, but insisted that the ITS was still operational and continues to roll out as planned.

In the three days since going live, he added, 1.14 million packs had been scanned by the ITS system, and 90 per cent of them (around 870,000) were carrying the new barcode. All but a few specialty medicinal products are supposed to be carrying the codes by next month.

Some products - such as peritoneal dialysis solutions, enteral nutrition products and some medical foods - are excluded from the system until January 1, 2011.


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