Pictured: HDA’s CEO and President Chip Davis, Spherity’s Georg Jürgens, Legisym’s David Kessler and HDA’s EVP, Industry Relations, Membership and Education; and COO, HDA Research Foundation Perry Fri.

INDIANAPOLIS — The Healthcare Distribution Alliance (HDA) honored Spherity and Legisym with the 2023 Distribution Management Award (DMA) in recognition of the companies’ work on a credentialing solution for Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) Authorized Trading Partner (ATP) authentication. The award was presented during the 2023 Distribution Management Conference and Expo in Indianapolis.

The DMA annually recognizes HDA member companies’ efforts to enhance the efficiency, effectiveness and safety of the healthcare supply chain through innovative and successful trading partner initiatives. Winning companies are selected by the distributor and manufacturer member executives of the HDA Industry Relations Council.

Effective November 27, 2023, the healthcare supply chain must share transaction data along with serialized product upon a change of ownership, in compliance with the DSCSA. The law, while providing patient security benefits, will also require the ability to transact with authenticated trading partners for DSCSA-regulated electronic product identifier (PI) verifications. Using Spherity’s enterprise identity solutions and Legisym’s pharmaceutical compliance expertise, the partnership developed a production-ready credentialing solution that can be used by Verification Router Service (VRS)-enabled pharmaceutical supply chain actors.

“HDA is proud to recognize Spherity and Legisym for their innovative supply chain solutions to drive compliance with the law. Their efforts to help trading partners effectively authenticate DSCSA-regulated electronic product identifier verifications is a great example of collaboration within the healthcare sector,” said Perry Fri, HDA Executive Vice President of Industry Relations, Membership and Education; and COO, HDA Research Foundation.

The solution came out of a successful April 2020 cross-functional pilot conducted with the Center for Supply Chain Studies, rfxcel, SAP, Novartis, Johnson & Johnson, Bristol-Myers Squibb and AmerisourceBergen, and further refined through the nonprofit Open Credentialing Initiative (OCI) in April 2021, which was spearheaded by the Spherity-Legisym partnership. In 2022, the solution achieved its production-ready status and the OCI developed mature architectural and governance frameworks.

Among other benefits, the credentialing solution can generate automated audit trails, enabling timely investigations, since an individual company does not need to undergo a separate process with each new trading partner. Further, it can handle both the ATP and the PI verification requests in less than one minute to avoid processing delays. The solution is also operationally efficient as it maximizes the use of existing processes as much as possible.

Additionally, HDA named Gilead Sciences as a DMA merit finalist for their efforts to protect the pharmaceutical supply chain from counterfeit products. Gilead worked with supply chain partners and law enforcement, and ultimately filed a lawsuit to help stop multiple individuals and companies that counterfeited the company’s products, which helped protect patients and businesses from the risks associated with counterfeit goods.

Past DMA winners have included AmerisourceBergen, for their critical role in developing a smaller minimum order solution to enable greater distribution of the lifesaving COVID-19 vaccine; The MediLedger Project, a collaboration between companies, including five HDA members, to explore using blockchain technology to comply with the DSCSA interoperability requirements; as well as Smith Drug Company, for their cloud-based predictive inventory management system.