Amidst the raging coronavirus crisis, accounts of family members struggling to find life-saving drugs are being reported all across India. It is due to rampant black marketing that the prices of critical drugs, such as Remdesivir and Tocilizumab, have inflated up to 20 times their real value. The Supreme Court has taken note of the matter. On 30th April, a bench headed by Justice D.Y. Chandrachud stated: “This is a condemnable attempt to exploit people’s misery and profit from their helplessness.”

The theft of medicines is also referred to as drug diversion. The problem undeniably exists in the case of opioids and addictive substances, but it has become as big a menace for non-control substances as well. Examples include expensive drugs that have a high street value (like oncology drugs) or, of late, COVID-19 drugs and vaccines. It is the attractive resale value that lands these drugs on the black market. In a recent incident, 32 persons were arrested, including a doctor, on charges of black marketing Remdesivir in Nagpur.

How can AI help?

In a recent chat with Healthcare IT news, Tom Knight, CEO of Invistics, talks about his company’s AI-powered software for inventory visibility and analytics, and in particular, software that can detect when medications are stolen. Referring to the ongoing scramble for therapeutics and vaccines for COVID 19, he says, “People are actually stealing vaccines… either for their loved ones or to sell on the black market.”

Invistics is an American company that has developed a proprietary software – Flowlytics – to detect potential drug diversion. This cloud-based solution uses machine learning and advanced analytics to track the movement of drugs across the complexity of a health system supply chain. Explaining how it works, he says, “We take data that a healthcare facility already has, like in their electronic medical records and their automated dispensing cabinets. And we consolidate all that data together into an analytics engine that we've trained using machine learning, to detect known patterns of diversion, and because we've trained it to see those patterns, it can process through huge haystacks of data and find the individuals that should be investigated either for potential theft or for clinical practice issues that could have been covering them.” 

Flowlytics is an outstanding example of how automation, AI, and machine learning can be used to improve the medical supply chain. “Invistics has been focusing on tracking inventory across the whole supply chain. In the case of medications, we've actually been working with pharmaceutical manufacturers for over 20 years. And we now track that medication all the way through the supply chain, through distribution, till it's purchased by a health care facility or maybe a retail pharmacy, till it's eventually dispensed or administered to the patient. And what we found is there's incredible data out there, so that we can track it much more accurately and securely than maybe we have in the past.”

The most crucial event to track is every time the medication is changing hands, as this is where the largest scope for leakage lies. The software, therefore, has been expanded to look across the whole supply chain. Essentially, data and tech are being deployed all the way from the production to the patient, along with every transfer custody along the way. “What our software does is every time it changes hands, whether it being sold from one company to another, or passed from one clinician to another, it makes sure that things reconcile: the number of doses, the number of cases, the number of injections all line up.”

According to Tom, “COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics are going to continue to be stolen and we need to be vigilant in the healthcare community to anything we can do to keep control on those medications."

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