Stream: Covid-19 Response
Topic: Yet another operational challenge
Jose Costa Teixeira (Mar 24 2020 at 22:17):
Another operational challenge (those pharmacists were right to bring this up) is not only the drug supply is under stress, but we are already seeing the appearance of falsified medicines.
Jose Costa Teixeira (Mar 24 2020 at 22:17):
so, not only drug shortages (supply), but also traceability issues.
Lloyd McKenzie (Mar 24 2020 at 23:30):
Traceability sounds like a hard thing to stand up a solution for in a hurry. Is there something you think that could be done in this space in the near-term?
Jose Costa Teixeira (Mar 24 2020 at 23:42):
The current approach is to keep a central record of each drug / batch / serial number along its path from manufacturer to hospital or pharmacy. In short, every SupplyDelivery.
Jose Costa Teixeira (Mar 24 2020 at 23:44):
And see if a batch appears on the market that has not been submitted by a manufacturer, or if the same batch/serial is being dispensed in New Zealand and Portugal (which indicates that one of them may not be legit)
Jose Costa Teixeira (Mar 24 2020 at 23:45):
There are repositories (being) set up but I don't know how they operate and what language they speak
Jose Costa Teixeira (Mar 24 2020 at 23:47):
I do not have any idea about what we can do in the short term
John Moehrke (Mar 25 2020 at 12:47):
sounds like an AuditEvent log of the progress of a given drug / batch / serial number.
John Moehrke (Mar 25 2020 at 12:49):
essentially that is what is done in supply-chain use-cases that are leveraging BlockChain. They just put a record into the blockchain. We can deploy FHIR AuditEvent faster than a blockchain. I suspect drugs are a valuable enough thing to justify the blockchain solution. SupplyChain, like vegetables, are already in production using blockchan.
John Moehrke (Mar 25 2020 at 12:50):
so it is not clear for this use-case which would be faster, pushing this need to existing supplyChain tracking, blockchain tracking, or FHIR AuditEvent.
Jose Costa Teixeira (Mar 25 2020 at 12:57):
SupplyDelivery tracks the delivery (well there is a small gap there but it hasn't deserved any attention so far).
what would make it resemble an AuditEvent? One could argue that also a Dispense could work there, but we don't need to tweak any of those resources, I think.
John Moehrke (Mar 25 2020 at 13:31):
supply chain record is a record of all the shipping and touching points from source to use. Who is recording, Where are they recording, What are they doing, What are they handling (supply), When, etc... Thus one can roll back the supplychain events to figure out who mishandled it. The SupplyDelivery and Dispense are events that are within an organization that is the final destination. Supply chain is all the touches prior to it getting there.
Jose Costa Teixeira (Mar 25 2020 at 13:32):
Why is SupplyDelivery within an organisation?
John Moehrke (Mar 25 2020 at 13:34):
Im simply reading the Scope and Usage http://build.fhir.org/supplydelivery.html#scope
Jose Costa Teixeira (Mar 25 2020 at 13:37):
ah true. SupplyDelivery on FHIR is expected within org, because external supply chain is other stuff like GS1 - those are already connected to the hub normally.
But every organization could report their artifacts to any hub - and if they do FHIR, I'd rather have them do SupplyDelivery than AuditEvent
Lloyd McKenzie (Mar 25 2020 at 15:08):
AuditEvent doesn't seem to expose the 'system' the event happened on - unless that's one of the agents? My read is that it presumes that the AuditEvent instances all live on the relevant system, so collecting AuditEvents from a diversity of organizations and systems in one place could be challenging?
Last updated: Apr 12 2022 at 19:14 UTC
