(Yicai) Oct. 30 -- China will realize the complete traceability of drugs and medical consumables across their whole lifecycle nationwide by the end of this year. This will ensure drug-use safety by preventing the distribution of fake medicines and other unlawful activities. It will also raise the profile of producers and give them more opportunities for business co-operation.

Medical products will be tracked through the use of medical codes, which are unique 20-digit codes printed on the packaging, the National Healthcare Security Administration said at a press conference yesterday.

The codes of all drugs and medical consumables across the country will be scanned and entered into government databases by the end of the year, to realize omni-channel traceability from production to distribution, said Cao Wenbo, head of the encoding standard division at the NHSA's Big Data Center.

As of Oct. 28, some 3.1 billion traceable codes of drugs and medical consumables, involving 296,800 designated medical institutions and 497,200 drug stores, had been collected by 32 provincial-level medical insurance information platforms, the NHSA said. In the distribution segment, over 60 percent of medical institutions and 99 percent of drug stores have started this work.

Implementing traceable codes will help boost producers' brand image and ensure drug quality, Cao said. It will also enable firms to learn more about market demand and enhance management efficiency. In addition, it will prevent distributors from mixing fake and substandard drugs with genuine ones, ensuring the safety of patients, he added.

The NHSA is building a unified interface for producers and distributors to upload traceability codes to make medical products' information accessible nationwide. The information will be uploaded in a single upload, eliminating the need to carry out separate uploads from different provincial regulatory platforms, thus reducing the workload, Yicai learned.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Kim Taylor