Drug traceability code implementations reaches nearly 95%

Nearly 95 percent of insurance designated hospitals and pharmacies across China have implemented traceability codes for medical products as part of efforts to crack down on insurance frauds, the National Healthcare Security Administration said early this week.

The drug traceability code is a unique serial number assigned to each packaged unit of medications or medical consumables. The number is printed on the product's packaging once off the production line.

Implementation of the code is primarily aimed at reinforcing security of public insurance funds as it will facilitate detection of fraudulent activities such as reselling insured medications, faking prescriptions or the misuse of insurance cards.

The administration has been promoting collection and use of the traceability codes since April. As of recently, it has collected more than 15.8 billion codes, involving about 880,000 insurance-designated institutions, or 94.7 percent of all such institutions.

Fu Chaoqi, head of the administration's big data center, said that each box of medicine usually go through three to five distribution links before being obtained by consumers, and each link will generate traceability information.

China has about 4,300 manufacturers making insured medicines, 11,000 distributors and 930,000 insurance-designated institutions. A total of 247,000 types of medicines are covered by public insurance.

There are about 180 billion to 300 billion pieces of traceability information each year, he said.

Fu said that efforts are underway to build an online platform consolidating all traceability information.

Fang Biling contributed to this story.