Council of Europe introduces eTACT drug traceability service
Will allow patients to check medicine authenticity using smartphones or the Internet
The Council of Europe and its European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines & HealthCare (EDQM) have launched an IT-based traceability service called eTACT, which will allow patients to check the authenticity of their medicines using smartphones or the Internet.
eTACT, which is part of the Council of Europe’s global strategy to stop the illegal trade in fake drugs, covers all medicines in the legal supply chain and will be open to the 36 member states of the European Pharmacopoeia Commission and beyond.
The Council says eTACT will make a major contribution to combating counterfeit drugs by providing a ‘secure, inter-operable, efficient, cost-effective and flexible traceability service to protect patients’.
Consultations, technical workshops and a series of webinars for the relevant European authorities and patient organisations are to be organised in the coming months to help users understand the project, and to gather ideas to create a first-class traceability environment for medicines.
The EDQM recently held a two-day workshop in Strasbourg to highlight the latest technical developments in the eTACT project, which is being conducted with the support of IBM.