Opinion: Patient Safety Starts in the Supply Chain

Patient Safety continues to be a priority among nearly all healthcare providers within the United States. These providers are spending literally hundreds of millions annually to upgrade software, hardware, procedures and processes to control patient safety issues that effect millions of patients every year.

We know on the pharmaceutical front, hospitals, pharmacies and physicians are being pressed by regulatory agencies, managed care organizations and patient safety advocates to reduce the number of adverse incidents within their control.

As these healthcare providers increase their ability to control adverse incidents, a potentially more ominous and significantly more dangerous, seemingly undetectable threat is proliferating within their midst and they have few tools to adequately combat the threat.

As we are seeing on a daily basis in the news, there is a new and dangerous threat that confronts these healthcare professional on a daily basis, the very real and expanding menace of contaminated, adulterated and counterfeit medications.

In a new economy of a global supply chain of pharmaceuticals, healthcare providers in the United States are now facing a hazard that their peers globally have faced for many years, medications that at best may not be clinically efficacious and worst may be a serious risk to their health.

The statistics and economics of this scourge are well documented but what is not as apparent, especially to those healthcare professionals on the front lines, is what and how they can protect their patients from this peril.

The solution for this danger, lies within the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain.

This solution goes beyond the current efforts of pedigrees, RFID chips and barcodes.

The solution is the verification and authentication of the contents of the medications, within their sealed container within the various stages of the pharmaceutical supply chain from manufacturer to distributor to dispenser.

This solution can only be found in the technology of EDXRD and the overall solution of XStream Systems XT250.

By using EDXRD, the XT250 penetrates through the packaging of the material and authenticates the molecular signature of the material within the container eliminating the danger of contaminated, adulterated and counterfeit medications reaching the patient or end consumer.

The XT250 is engineered to be used within the Supply Chain, by non-technical resources in a fast and efficient manner by the manufacturer, distributors and dispensers to protect the effectiveness of the medications being administered by healthcare professionals.

Healthcare professionals need to question their pharmaceutical supply chain partners and ask them what defenses they have deployed within their business to protect your patients from this ever growing threat.

Healthcare professionals need to understand what kind of analysis if any is being done to insure that the medications that they are dispensing or administering to their patients are safe and effective.

Healthcare professionals need to take an active role in making certain that the supply chain which services them has the XT250 deployed so that their patients are protected from the global scourge of contaminated, adulterated and counterfeit medications.