Congress Might Mandate a Federal Drug-Tracking System

(MoneyWatch)  Over the past few years, a rise in counterfeit versions of name-brand drugs has generated a fair amount of concern within government and the drug industry. (The growing scandal over tainted heparin, while a separate issue, hasn't helped.) And yet drugmakers have balked at current plans to track genuine drugs from factory to pharmacy.

So it's no surprise that Congress is now thinking about legislating a nationwide tracking system. The recently introduced "Safeguarding America's Pharmaceuticals Act" (HR 5839) would preempt state efforts at building such systems (such as those of California and Florida) while putting the Department of Health and Human Services in charge of regulating a federal tracking program into existence and determining exactly how drugs are to be tracked -- via bar codes, radio-frequency tags (RFID), some form of nanotechnology identifiers, or something else -- by 2012 or so.

The proposed legislation would also offer grants to small pharmacies that might have trouble paying for the necessary technology and lets drugmakers request exemptions from the tracking requirement under limited circumstances.

It's impossible to know at the moment how much support this measure might command in Congress, although it seems unlikely that the drug industry will be lobbying heavily for it. In California, for instance, the drug industry has asked for a second two-year extension in order to comply with a 2005 state law intended to curb the distribution of counterfeit drugs. Pharmaceutical makers and distributors complain that changes required by the law cost too much and are more complex than the state believes.

On the other hand, companies with technology that might support drug tracking are pushing harder to boost public interest in the issue. One of the latest signs: The recent launch of the Drug Safety Hub group blog, which features no fewer than 11 contributors, including three from the blog's sponsor, SupplyScape, which describes itself as "the leading provider of software to secure the safety and value of the pharmaceutical supply chain." (Drug Safety Hub, of course, has already weighed in on the merits of HR5839 -- unsurprisingly, it's all for it.)

(Hat tip: Pharmaceutical Executive)

Image by Flickr user Orin Optiglot, CC 2.0