GaneData is calling for the UK to change the way prescription drugs are tracked and traced through an IoT (Internet of Things) supply chain mechanism.
The company, which is based in Leeds, is the one of the first UK organisations using FI WARE technology to develop and test healthcare applications that give patients and healthcare professional transparency across the entire supply chain, as part of an EU funded research project called FI STAR.
FI STAR* (Future Internet Social and Technological Alignment Research) is a research and development project, which has set up "Use Cases" across seven different European countries including the UK, Germany, Norway, Spain, Italy, Poland and Romania. Funded by the European Union's Seventh Programme for research, technological development and demonstration, the objective of the project is to evaluate FI WARE technology within the healthcare sector as a method to help increase patient transparency and awareness of their medications, optimise and streamline better processes within hospitals and improve quality of care.
GaneData, which has a long history of developing automatic identification solutions, is part of a group which includes local pharmacy group Medichem that is using real-time barcoding solutions to prevent errors with medications, help combat counterfeit drugs entering the distribution chain and develop applications that allow patients to view specific information about medications.
GaneData reports that it as been motivated by seeing how other market sectors such as retail and commerce have been improved and transformed by the rapid growth of technologies.
Altaf Sadique, Managing Director of GaneData, said: "Continued technological innovations are helping the healthcare industry to deliver better care to patients. E-Health is a rapidly expanding field serving providers and consumers alike in many ways. Transforming processes through new and innovative technologies for healthcare has increasingly become necessary as the government and the NHS try to make savings within the sector. Innovations in the area of electronic healthcare are having a positive impact on care delivery."
Sadique went on to say, "This scope of the whole FI STAR project across Europe is massive and at the moment we are all seeing great results. Within Leeds alone visibility and access to supply chain history is key to the future of individualised medicine and self-management. The person creates a trusted relationship with local pharmacist allowing advice to be continuously reviewed to suit current needs, allows a person to receive patient information leaflets and other useful content on demand. This is found to be particularly useful for those using medical devices such as asthma inhalers or insulin (which are often subject to poor compliance).
In the future such devices maybe equipped with softsim technology allowing automated connection to the cloud, enabling real-time usage to be directly monitored by a physician – useful when patients call on other hospital services in listing their current prescriptions accurately. This of course has the added benefit of allowing harmful drugs to be promptly withdrawn and tracked, reducing risk to the patient."
The FI STAR project is now in its final testing phases.
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