Is Anti-Counterfeiting A Health Economics Activity?

After three days of conference presentations, intensive discussion and rubber chicken, I am on my way home from unusually chilly Florida with a case full of business cards, brochures, white papers etc. One of the difficulties expressed by several pharma industry speakers was obtaining the budgets necessary to do a comprehensive job. Putting patient protection programmes together costs money and these brand protection teams are often minimally funded.

It occurs to me that "product protection" is really just another way of ensuring that the patient gets the maximum benefit from the medical intervention that the drug represents. In this respect, it is effectively a branch of health economics and outcomes research (HEOR).  Companies are happy to spend shedfuls of money on these disciplines because they give insight into how their medicines can best be used and how they can get optimal reimbursement levels. Is it time to view patient benefit more holistically and include the avoidance of harm?

In this case, and to take a purely local example, maybe the UK's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE)  should review the effectiveness of anti-counterfeiting solutions?

I'm only partly joking here.  One of the difficulties that we face in highlighting the issue of fake drugs is the lack of established protocols for sampling fake drugs, for compiling statistics, and for quantitively evaluating the effectiveness of countermeasures.

Until we standardise our methods and use rigorous statistics (or as stringent as the data will allow) then we will struggle to make our case as effective as it could be.  By using the methods (and budgets) of our colleagues in HEOR, maybe we could find the elusive financial returns-on-investment for product protection, and improve patient outcomes at the same time at the same time.

UK Medicines Shortages: Supply, Demand and Danger

The weaknesses of the legal parallel drug trade in the EU have exposed again, as drug shortages threaten to hit the UK.  The weak pound is seemingly providing a temptation for wholesalers to make money by diverting UK drugs, bought at National Health Service-controlled prices, to other European markets where they can get a higher price.


The BBC reports a Royal Pharmaceutical Society call for action, which has oddly now been deleted from the RPS press releases page.  The UK Health Minister has condemned the resale of NHS drugs for higher prices abroad and has called an emergency summit for next month to discuss the issue.  The UK pharma trade body, the Association of British Pharmaceutical Industries, told the BBC that there is enough medicine to go round and distribution is to blame, although again no mention on theABPI press release page.
 
Supply and demand: the basis for all commerce. Unfortunately, if the drug shortage becomes a sustained issue then the UK will become a target for counterfeiters and criminals looking to make a quick buck by filling the hole.