ReAMPS: Resilience to Address Medicines Shortages for Patients

Medicine shortages are a threat to healthcare systems and negatively impact on patient care, putting patients at risk. The issue of medicine shortages has become widespread in recent years and has very recently moved beyond reports from professional associations, pharmaceutical and supply chain academic literature, to the mainstream media in Ireland. Ireland lies at the end of long, complex global medicines supply chains, which often start with active ingredient production in China or India. There are usually multiple independent supply chain entities between the origin and a medicine arriving at an Irish hospital or retail pharmacy shelf. Key features of medicines supply chains are their complexity, fragility and lack of resilience, as well as the absence of useful digital tools at individual country levels to manage the problem more efficiently.

Our solution comprises data driven risk identification models that will predict the likelihood of medicine shortages occurring, and resilience models that will enable scenario analysis to be carried out to illustrate the impact of different policies on the resilience of the medicine supply chain in Ireland. These are integrated in a web-based prototype digital platform that can be used at a national level by health policy makers and regulators, with information on shortages easily communicated to doctors and pharmacists in real time.