Ireland launches medicines verification organization

The Irish Medicines Verification Organisation (IMVO) has been established by the key players in the medicines supply chain.

The IMVO will handle the setting up of the national system that will link to the central EU hub and upload transaction data in accordance with the Falsified Medicines Directive (FMD), which in February 2019 requires the use of serialized codes to allow medicines to be verified before being dispensed to patients.

Irish Health Minister Simon Harris said forming the IMVO is "an important initiative which will help to protect Irish patients from the threat of falsified medicines."

To set the problem in context, over 650,000 dosage units of falsified and other illegal medicines bought over the Internet were detained coming into Ireland in 2016, according to the Health Products Regulatory Authority (HPRA).

To date, there have been no reports of falsified medicines being distributed through legitimate channels in Ireland, it continues, but as eight such cases were detected in the UK between 2011 and 2015 "the risk cannot be ignored."

Before supplying the medicine to a patient, pharmacists will scan the barcode to check the data against a central database managed by IMVO with the help of SolidSoft - one of the blueprint providers of the IT platforms nominated by the European Medicines Verification Organization (EMVO). If the pack details are not found in the database, an alert will be generated and an investigation will take place to find out if the pack is genuine or not.

The IMVO is led by Professor Pat O'Mahony, who said: "Implementing these requirements by the 2019 deadline is a significant challenge for pharmaceutical manufacturers, parallel distributors, wholesalers and pharmacists but the organisations who represent them in IMVO are committed to building on progress to date and working towards meeting this deadline."

NMVOs have also been set up in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK, according to the EMVO website.