How Product Serialization helps healthcare systems?

In pharmaceutical and healthcare industry falsified and counterfeit products pose a global public health risk. These substandard drugs and surgical equipment are actively dangerous that can cause serious damage to the consumer’s health. As the healthcare products are manufactured at multiple locations such as chemical synthesis in one country, assembly and packing in another country- making it difficult to keep track of small units of supply chain across the globe.

What is Product Serialization?

The process of labeling individual sealable units of inventory with a unique number. For an inventory bulk operations these numbers are assigned sequentially to the units belong to that bulk. These numbers can be numeric or alphanumeric. For products with subassemblies and different components such as electronics, medical devices or home appliances, the individual component can also have their serial numbers.

Need of Serialization in Healthcare System

Healthcare and pharmaceutical sector face a lot of challenges in their production, management and supply chin operations. US Food and Drug Administration recommend that pharma companies must implement track and trace systems to enhance the security of delivery of right drugs and surgical instrument to customers.

1. To Improve Supply chain security

Serialization of individual item will allow to trace and track the product at granular level. This will enhance the integrity of supply chain and with item-level traceability healthcare systems gain a new level to efficiently manage and control supply chain operations.

2. For enhanced Trace and Track ability

The ability to track individual products at smallest unit enable to trace the medical products from manufacturing level down to the consumer level. This help to ascertain which products are authentic and legitimate and which are counterfeit as product without serial number are more likely to be duplicate.

3. For the Prevention of Price violations

If any unauthorized dealer or retailer is selling the product other than the advertised price product serialization give a powerful tool to prevent them in doing so. Serial number of the product allow you to track down the vendor and identify which distributor was responsible for these violation and take prompt response to remediate the situation.

4. To improve Quality Control

In healthcare system it is necessary to ensure that product reaching to the patient is of original quality because entry of any substandard product poses risk directly associated to the health if the patient. In case of any such issue patient or healthcare bodies are entitles to take a legal actions against pharmaceutical companies Product serialization make quality control much easier. If any defect in quality control process arise serial number will help to track the faulty device or equipment to their origin- the supplier for the source component and the date of manufacturing to trace the issue back to its root and prevent it from happening again.

To improve recall Management

For healthcare manufacturer recalls are a big tension. But serialization helps for faster resolution. Serial number give the information that exactly which units have defects and then these items can be easily trace back through the supply chain to identify where the defect has occurred. The necessary action can be taken to quickly fix the problem and to prevent it happening in future.

Conclusion

Product serialization can help in a big way to efficiently manage healthcare manufacturing and supply chain operations and keep away the threat of counterfeit and substandard drugs and equipment supply in the market. Although it takes time and cost for implementation but the benefits are clear and greater in number. Check out how ERP Gold is helping healthcare systems to implement serialization to reap these benefits.