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TraceLink: Digital Network Platform to Further Transform the Global Pharmaceutical Supply Chain

The platform is designed to allow users to rapidly design and deploy network orchestration and analytics applications, enabling patient-centric orchestration across the end-to-end life sciences value chain.

Digital Network Platform to Further Transform the Global Pharmaceutical Supply Chain
Digital Network Platform to Further Transform the Global Pharmaceutical Supply Chain

TraceLink, an integrated digital supply network, announces the launch of the Digital Network Platform. Built on top of the TraceLink Digital Supply Network, and designed for the rapid development of applications utilizing its multi-enterprise collaboration and data sharing capabilities, TraceLink’s Digital Network Platform is meant to drive innovation and enable the creation of new supply chain operating models centered around the patient.

The TraceLink network is used to track serialized medicines as they move from production to the patient. With the launch of the Digital Network Platform, TraceLink customers will be supposed to have access to a new class of network orchestration and analytics applications in order to unlock even more value from their digitalized supply chains and provide the power to orchestrate patient outcomes in new ways.

The Digital Network Platform is designed to provide an environment for the development of network orchestration applications that enable partners to integrate and exchange transactional information inter-operably about common business processes through standardized, secure, and permissioned interfaces, thereby creating new digital business process ecosystems. The network data generated from these network orchestration applications are then meant to feed into analytics models that apply machine learning, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics to create analytics applications that can help solve complex supply chain and healthcare problems.

“With the coming proliferation of specialty drugs and personalized medicine, the pharmaceutical supply chain will need a dramatic transformation, moving from a focus on supply to a focus on the needs of the patient,” says Shabbir Dahod, president and CEO, TraceLink.

Dahod further explains that with the Digital Network Platform, TraceLink should be able to provide customers with the means to create new digital operating models that will meet the needs of tomorrow’s pharmaceutical industry. He says, “By rapidly onboarding supply chain partners into new network ecosystems, sharing real-time information, and orchestrating multi-enterprise business processes, our customers can ensure that every patient gets the treatment they need when they need it.”

New Applications to be Delivered on the Digital Network Platform

Throughout 2020, TraceLink will release a series of applications on the Digital Network Platform, in the hopes to enable supply network integration, end-to-end business process orchestration, and real-time analytics, including:

  • Serialization Process Intelligence—this transformative application is meant to provide customers with automated reporting and end-to-end visibility into their global serialization processes. With Serialization Process Intelligence, organizations should be able to combine data from multiple sources into one single source of the truth and analyze data to demonstrate compliance with worldwide track and trace regulations, investigate exceptions quickly and keep products moving through the supply chain, prevent product shortages, and get to a business as usual state.

  • Experience Design Environment (XDE)—this application is designed to enable role-based user experiences to be personalized to the unique requirements of an individual or job function. Using the XDE, application access can be streamlined so every employee has an intuitive and productive user experience, according to the company.

  • Smart Supply Manager—this application is made to source, centralize, and distribute real-time, product condition information relative to serialized medications sourced from a network of connected IoT devices and sensors.

  • Smart Product Excursion Tracking—this application is meant to enable pharmaceutical companies to collect edge information associated with real-time product conditions (including temperature and environmental excursions) as well as the patient context associated with the consumption of specialty medicines back through distribution to the original source of manufacturing in order to ensure the integrity and safety of specialty medicines as they move through the supply chain.

  • Digital Recalls—this application should empower users with a streamlined platform for real-time updates on product recalls and coordination across the supply chain. This is to allow for a more agile and patient-focused approach to product recall issues in order to increase product safety, staff efficiency, and brand protection.

  • TraceLink Development Environment (TDE)—this low code application development environment is designed to enable developers to rapidly create highly scalable apps to connect supply chain processes across the multi-enterprise TraceLink Network. Using the TDE, TraceLink, its customers, and partners could develop the apps to power the digital supply chain and enable patient centric orchestration, says the company.

“Organizations within the pharmaceutical industry—as with essentially every other industry—are undergoing a digital transformation in their supply chain,” says Simon Ellis, program vice president for IDC research. “Businesses recognize that in order to keep up, they must adopt modern digital technologies that will enable this transformation. However, the pharmaceutical industry has more constraints than others, with complicated and evolving regulations to ensure patient safety. This leaves many companies wondering how to effectively introduce the necessary technologies to progress transformation efforts while still complying with the strict regulatory requirements they face on an ongoing basis. TraceLink’s existing extensive serialization and track and trace network leverages all the data currently in and flowingthough the network and provides the foundation for data-driven decision making in the pharmaceutical supply chain. Now, with the availability of TraceLink’s Digital Network Platform, users will have access to self-service technology codifying partner connectivity and visibility across the end-to-end healthcare system. The platform will allow traditional business processes to yield higher-level insights to improve patient outcomes and potentially save lives.”

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