Fighting Fake Drugs in Africa

According to Healthcare Packaging magazine (April 2011), the companies fund a service implemented by information systems company Hewlett Packard and an organization called mPedigree Network that assigns a code to each package of medicine. A patient scratches off a coating to reveal the code and then sends a free text message to verify that the code is authentic. If it is not, the patient gets back a message that says the pack may be fake and provides a number for reporting the incident. HP provides the hosting infrastructure for the service, as well as security and integrity systems, and mPedigree Network provides the business process interfaces for assigning, printing and monitoring the codes.