Are there other areas you've found to be helpful?

Prest: Yes. Since we receive the EDI documents as they flow though the pipeline we are able to spot trends in real time and feed sales reports back to the manufacturer daily from the big three wholesalers. This is a change since getting actual prescription data can take weeks and is not always accurate. The EDI information is actual sales data, and so it doesn't need extrapolation.

 We've seen a lot in the news recently about counterfeit drugs entering the marketplace. These obviously don't flow through the standard supply chain. Have you run up against these practices?

Prest: In fact, we've been able to spot several cases where patients have been affected. The drugs were either counterfeit, fake, or even low dosage drugs relabeled as high dosage, and sold at the high-dosage prices. There are currently regulations pending for drug pedigree registration and tracking, but they are not in place yet. With the EDI data, we can do a pretty good job knowing if product is in the channel that didn't come from the manufacturer. We look for anomalies in the data. We review current and previous week information. For instance, if we take the ending inventory plus shipments received, less what was sold, we would expect to get the current on-hand quantity. If that number is different, we report it as a discrepancy, and we can find the location that was responsible.