Assessing the relative effectiveness of technological strategies for fighting counterfeit medicines

One tenth of the medicines commercialized around the world are counterfeit medicines, representing an estimated value of 75 billion US dollars in 2010 and raising serious security and health concerns. This paper focuses on the technological initiatives undertaken by the stakeholders of different pharmaceutical supply chains. More specifically, we will analyze the two overall technological strategies, namely the end-to-end verification system vs. E-pedigree system, and the two competing technologies which are envisioned to act as data carriers, the two-dimensional barcode called Datamatrix, and the Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) tag. We will also present some empirical evidence from 72 European and North-American organizations in order to assess the effectiveness of these technological strategies.

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