The pandemic has given us an opportunity to assess the resilience and weaknesses of our global supply chains. No other sector has been under the microscope as much as the pharmaceutical sector in the last 3 years. One of the major challenges for the pharmaceutical industry is bringing visibility to their products in the supply chain. Different stakeholders, including the government, must pitch in to ensure that there is complete transparency and traceability of pharmaceutical products across the supply chain.

One such success story is that Vaccine Ledger is a flagship soluiton of Statwig in Costa Rica, bringing visibility of vaccines from supplier to last mile. The government, two of the most significant supply chain distributors, and several hospitals and pharmacies worked in tandem to make this project a success.

KEY PLAYERS

The Costa Rican Chamber of Health wanted to partner with Statwig because of its strong association with UNICEF and the IDB for the successful innovation of the VaccineLedger solution that was conducted in December 2020 on end-to-end tracking of vaccines.

CHALLENGES

A few key challenges that we identified in Costa Rica were:

• Lack of a consolidated platform for all the stakeholders to track and trace pharma products, in this case, vaccines.

• The government entity (CCSS) is mainly responsible for procuring and storing the vaccines. They have close to 1 million doses which will expire in February/March 2023. Finding a way to get these vaccines delivered to the end beneficiary is a major task.

• Vaccines are extremely volatile and have to be stored at a specific temperature. Pfizer Vaccines are generally stored at -70 C. When these vaccines are removed from their normal temperature, they need to be maintained between 2-8 C. They last for up to 10 weeks at this temperature.

• The distribution system of the vaccines is slightly complex. Only hospitals and distributors can receive these vaccines from CCSS. The distributors can then send them to the pharmacies and deliver them to the end consumer. But keeping track of all the steps while the vaccines are delivered was not easy as there was no system to collect, monitor and report this information.

• Keeping track of vaccine inventory and updating it timely was not seamless with so many players and steps involved.

• No fool proof way to ensure that the beneficiary is getting the vaccine and if the quality of the vaccine is compromised in the process or not.

• As per the government rules we were not allowed to collect any personal information of the beneficiary apart from generic information like age and gender.

SOLUTION

Statwig’s VaccineLeder solutions is an ideal match for tracking vaccines from suppliers to beneficiaries, which provides complete transparency in the supply chain of any kind of pharma product. The government entity, CCSS, receives all orders from suppliers directly and then chose the following two paths for implementation of solution.

The VaccineLedger solution ensures that a unique QR code is assigned to every vaccine that is in CCSS’s storage, with access to its location and temperature. Once the order is placed, our solution keeps track of it until it reaches the final beneficiary, and all the information can be accessed through the website or the mobile application anytime and anywhere. By monitoring and updating information constantly, we ensure that the inventory is kept up to date.

We had to come up with an innovative way to verify if the end beneficiary received the vaccine. While vaccinating the beneficiaries, the pharmacies and hospitals collect details such as age and gender, with which we help generate reports on specific age groups, genders, and localities.

Our company's goal is to increase visibility and transparency, particularly in pharmaceutical supply chains around the world, and we are pleased to have moved one step closer to that goal.