On January 1, 2020, the law on the labeling of medicines comes into force in the country. The purpose of the innovations is to increase the transparency of the circulation of medicines, defeat counterfeit and counterfeit products, and give the buyer the opportunity to independently verify all medicines.

How will innovation affect pricing? Will the consumer suffer? How does a unified automated system for monitoring drug circulation work in practice? What are the pros, cons and pitfalls of the system? What difficulties did you encounter during registration and practical participation in the program?

These and other questions were discussed by experts at the roundtable “Labeling of drugs: how will the new system affect prices?”, which was held at the press center of Komsomolskaya Pravda Publishing House.

The event brought together representatives of Federal Service for Surveillance in Healthcare,

patient associations, pharmacy and pharmaceutical associations, business, and the labeling system operator. The company NANOLEK at the round table was introduced by Alexey Ryzhiy, Director of the Department of Information Technology.

The discussion showed that in general all market participants are actively preparing for the introduction of labeling, but they express concerns: if at least one of the participants in the distribution chain is not ready the drug supply of the entire country can be at risk. 

Aleksey Ryzhiy noted that as for any global project to mandatory labeling need serious attitude:

“Now there is an understanding that it is critically important to conduct a transition period for trial operation of the system throughout the country, during which the parties will not have strict sanctions (for example, total blocking of the participant’s activity in the event of failures, inconsistencies of the system that are unavoidable at startup project on such a scale), develop a plan of legal consequences, taking into account all the problems encountered in the process of the system. In addition, we as a manufacturer are extremely interested in accessing data on the movement of our goods at no additional cost, because traceability is the main bonus from the introduction of mandatory digital marking. This issue also needs to be addressed.

In any case we hope that the transition to compulsory labeling in our country will occur as painlessly as possible for all market players and we will be able, with state support, to follow world practices in regulating the pharmaceutical industry”.