PR: Verizon joins forces with rfXcel to protect pharmaceutical supply chain

Verizon and rfXcel have joined forces to deliver the newly available Verizon Intelligent Track and Trace solution, which helps monitor and trace pharmaceutical products in the supply chain and improve overall patient safety.

Leveraging Verizon’s Internet of Things platform ‘ThingSpace’ and its world-class network, the rfXcel Traceability System platform enables pharmaceutical manufacturers to provide real-time monitoring of product temperatures, location and other key product attributes anywhere along the pharmaceutical supply chain. Verizon Intelligent Track and Trace can also create, manage, allocate and store large volumes of individual and hierarchical serial numbers to provide visibility and control and help detect counterfeit drugs more easily.

Verizon’s Intelligent Track and Trace solution will help address some of the pharmaceutical industry’s biggest issues, such as theft, channel diversion, counterfeiting and safe handling. The World Health Organization estimates 10 to 15 percent of the world’s drug supply is counterfeit, with counterfeit drugs in the US approximately 1 percent and in some countries, the estimate is as high as 50 percent. According to American Health & Drug Benefits, the value of the counterfeit drug market is $75 billion annually, leading to more than 100,000 patient deaths.

The solution delivers a host of benefits to pharmaceutical and healthcare clients, including:

• Supply chain management: This IoT technology gives users the ability to monitor, trace and serialize product hierarchies, by pallet, case or individual unit

• Improve patient safety: Attributes such as temperature, light, location, shock and other key attributes can be monitored in real-time and provide valuable alerts if any attribute changes through the course of the supply chain

• Facilitate compliance with government regulations: Verizon Intelligent Track and Trace will provide information that when managed by customer’s compliance organization will relate to compliance with government regulations such as the US Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA).

The Verizon Intelligent Track and Trace cloud-based system is now commercially available and already includes some of the top global pharmaceutical manufacturers as pilot customers.\