Key to the EU Clasified Medicines Directive (FMD) is the reliable traceability of any drug from manufacture to the end-user. Effective serialisation is essential to achieving this and this includes the need for a suitable vision system to allow the reading and verification of all pharma variant codes, including EAN, 1D and 2D.
This information is crucial to the entire distribution process, and to delivering secure data transactions required as part of the traceability system. It helps to ensure product security and patient safety – so it is critical that every pack that leaves a factory is correctly printed and the information it contains is easy to access.
While inaccurate or faulty printing may cause only minor inconvenience in most markets, in the pharmaceuticals and healthcare sector it could be a matter of life or death
However, it would be wrong to consider that compliance with the FMD is the only good reason for installing a vision system. It is just as important to demonstrate effective quality control as part of a company’s entire processing and packing operation. While inaccurate or faulty printing may cause only minor inconvenience in most markets, in the pharmaceuticals and healthcare sector it could be a matter of life or death. And any such errors can also have a huge impact on the manufacturer, namely the risk of litigation and the costs of recalling a product, not to mention the damage this can bring to a company’s or a brand’s reputation.
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