Resilience needed in medical supply chain

Hyderabad: Ronald Piervincenzi, Chief Executive Officer of US Pharmacopeia, on Tuesday said "there should be resilience in medical supply chain and value of good manufacturing".

On insights on medical supply chain vulnerabilities, he said new vulnerabilities are driven by greater complexity of the upstream supply chain. The root causes are increased pressure on margins, particularly for generics, insufficient incentives for quality, regulatory and logistical hurdles that prevent agile responsiveness to market events, he added.

"We have identified key actions to secure a more resilient supply chain. These are foster more, not less, and supply chain diversity; invest in more manufacturing capacity for critical medicines and enable more transparency and data sharing; conduct crisis contingency planning and action; strengthen regulatory systems and quality assurance globally," Piervincenzi said.

Stating that there needs to be a greater upstream supply chain transparency, he said the US Pharmacopeia is building a system to proactively identify and mitigate supply chain risk.