Temporary stickers help Turkey's meet serialisation deadline

Turkey has moved onto the next stage of its medicine serialisation scheme, although it has had to implement the interim measure of using temporary overstickers for products without datamatrix codes in order to meet the latest deadline in the roll-out.

As of yesterday (July 1), all pharmacists in Turkey's serialisation scheme (ITS) were officially unable to gain reimbursement for medicines which are not carrying the new 2D datamatrix code.

There are still a number of products circulating without the codes, however, which has been attributed to difficulties experienced by some pharmaceutical manufacturers in implementing the technology required to print them on the pack, and also some resistance to the scheme among smaller companies.

The Ministry of Health in Turkey has implemented a system of temporary barcode stickers - known as G2Ds - which can be affixed by the pharmacist onto a pack that does not carry a 2D code. With that in place the pharmacist can record the transaction and secure reimbursement for the product.

The ITS started operating on May 16 and since then the more than 22,000 pharmacies have adopted it, with nearly 12,000 medicinal products registered in the system.

The Turkish authorities are pushing hard to maintain momentum behind the roll-out of the ITS, which is the first 2D datamatrix-based medicine serialisation system to be adopted at national scale in Europe.

The next deadline to be met is the addition of codes to packing cases in order to link codes at the folding box level to the case in which they are shipped. That deadline comes on 1 January 2011.


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