Online registration for pharmacies and hospitals now open

31st October 2018

IMVO is delighted to announce that online registration for pharmacies and hospitals is now open. This is an important milestone to assist pharmacies and hospitals in complying with new EU Falsified Medicines Directive (‘FMD’) requirements that come into effect on 9th February 2019. IMVO has contacted all community pharmacies and hospitals registered with the Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland with details of how to register. Registering with IMVO is a pre-requisite for connecting the system that community pharmacies and hospitals will use to scan barcodes, to the IMVO repository. For more information, include HSE updates, visit our pharmacies & hospitals page.

Wholesaler registration will commence shortly and wholesalers will receive a separate notification from IMVO.

We are delighted to announce that the first serialised pack was decommissioned in Ireland in Moore’s Pharmacy in Crumlin, Dublin, on 20th June. We believe this may have been the first pack decommissioned in a community pharmacy anywhere in Europe using the ‘blueprint’ system model . The pack scanned was a J&J product and the system used was ezFMD provided by HE Clissmann.

According to Leonie Clarke, IMVO Project Manager “IMVO is delighted that Ireland continues to be at the forefront of rolling out the European Medicines Verification System and we applaud everyone involved in reaching this important milestone. We are particularly appreciative of the support of all the pharmacies, hospitals, wholesalers, manufacturers and IT software providers who have volunteered to take part in our pilot.”

We are delighted to announce that the first serialised pack was verified in Ireland by PCO Manufacturing on 30th May, using their wholesaler connection to the Irish Medicines Verification System and the EasyFMD system supplied by Quick Pharm Solutions. Ireland was amongst the first five countries in Europe to start scanning of serialised packs using a live connection to the national medicines verification system.

According to Leonie Clarke, IMVO Project Manager “IMVO congratulates PCO on this significant achievement and looks forward to many more packs being verified and decommissioned in Ireland over the coming months.”

IMVO announce appointment of new IT Manager - Robert Antal

1st May 2018

Robert is an IT professional with over 30 years experience in the IT Industry. Having started his career as a computer engineer, working with one of the worlds IT leaders, Robert possesses extensive knowledge of Enterprise IT Infrastructure. Robert has spent the last decade managing service delivery into ICT environments for a number of top tier Irish and international organisations.
His deep understanding of managing service delivery in mission critical environments will be of significant value to the IMVO.

Irish Medicines Verification System goes live

10th April 2018
We are delighted to announce that the Irish Medicines Verification System (IMVS) has been connected today to the production environment of the EU Hub. Reaching this important milestone means that IMVO can start its pilot and thus the implementation of the IT system to support the safety feature provisions of the EU Falsified Medicines Directive. Together with Germany, Slovenia, Denmark and Sweden, Ireland is among the first countries to go live in Europe.

A unique new not-for-profit organisation – the Irish Medicines Verification Organisation (IMVO) - has been established by the key players in the medicines supply chain in Ireland - pharmaceutical manufacturers, wholesalers, parallel distributors, and community pharmacists - as part of an EU-wide series of measures to tackle the growing problem of fake or ‘falsified’ medicines.

To set the problem in context, over 650,000 dosage units of falsified and other illegal medicines bought over the Internet were detained coming into Ireland in 2016, according to the Health Products Regulatory Authority (HPRA). To date, there have been no reports of falsified medicines being distributed through legitimate channels in Ireland, eight such cases were detected in the UK between 2011 and 2015 so the risk cannot be ignored.
To tackle this threat, new EU legislation will require all prescription medicine packs to carry a special barcode containing a serial number and other details which will be used to check that the pack is legitimate. Before supplying the medicine to a patient, the pharmacist will scan the barcode to check the data against a central database managed by IMVO. If the pack details are not found in the database, an alert will be generated and an investigation will take place to find out if the pack is fake. These new requirements come into effect from February 2019 and pharmacists and pharmaceutical manufacturers and wholesalers, individually and through IMVO, are already working to ensure that all the necessary systems are in place by then.

Speaking at the launch of IMVO, the Minister for Health, Simon Harris, TD, said “The stakeholders involved in IMVO are to be congratulated for coming together to oversee this important initiative which will help to protect Irish patients from the threat of falsified medicines. I am delighted to see that as a result of their efforts, Ireland is amongst the leading countries in Europe in terms of progress made to date on this project.”

IMVO’s chairperson, Professor Pat O’Mahony, commented: “Implementing these requirements by the 2019 deadline is a significant challenge for pharmaceutical manufacturers, parallel distributors, wholesalers and pharmacists but the organisations who represent them in IMVO are committed to building on progress to date and working towards meeting this deadline.”

News

31st October 2018