PSGH PREVENT INITIATIVE:

Beyond Ethical
Prescriptions
SELORM BRANTTIE,
PREVENT stands for:

Patients Research, Empowerment, Vigilance, and

Education Through New Technologies.
Main Stakeholders and Partners:

mPedigree Network
Pharmaceutical Society of Ghana

Local Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Distributors:

Ernest Chemists,
LaGray,
Dannex.
KAMA,
Kinapharma
Starwin
Ayrton Drugs
The Underlying Problem:

Sources of medicines in
Sub-Saharan Africa are
difficult to verify.

Poor borders also mean

breaches of the supply
chain integrity.

End users or consumers

are therefore very
vulnerable.
The Underlying Problem:

How can a consumer identify the fake?

This is a
question that
consumers
have to answer
daily!
Some Solutions:

Industry-led proactive solutions include:

Holograms Scanners RFID Tags MiniLab Kits

Some Solutions:

The Drawbacks:

Holograms are easily Faked

RFID and Scanners Cannot be deployed on a mass

scale in Ghana and most low-resource countries

MiniLabs are very accurate but also cant be

deployed in a mass consumer market proactively.
A Proactive Option: Serialization

Countries like
Turkey, Serbia,
USA Denmark,
Brazil, India, EU
are all
developing or
implementing
serialization
requirements
and standards.
A Proactive Option: Serialization

Africa has not yet adopted standards, but can

innovation help?
The PREVENT INITIATIVE in Ghana sought to address
this challenge proactively.

By linking all manufactured retail packs to unique 12-

digit codes, each medicine pack can be checked
by anyone with a mobile phone signal
A few things are achieved:

Serialization and effective market-level tracking of

pharmaceutical products and medicines.

Patients can also verify whether the medicine they

bought is from an authentic source.

Regulators can also enforce batch related recalls or

other oversight activity through red flags or alerts
So far:

Over 6 million packs of medicines (mostly

antimalarials) have been protected by the service

Since January 2015 there have been over 20,000

telephone calls to our hotline for enquiries.

Over 500,000 authentications and counting

Some observations:

Patients still need a lot of education on dosage

Most people who purchase medicines are not the

patients

Manufacturers can make use of metrics for very

important sales and distribution related activity and
forecasts.
The Future:

Providing this service and serialization methodology

over wider areas;

Already an Arab service runs in Egypt for Plavix.

A French service for Francophone Africa

A Swahili Service for the whole East Africa

Special mention to the PSGH as an important ally in
creating the right environment for fostering innovation
in healthcare through professional engagements and
interactions.

THANK YOU