Project Primary pack

Background
Some of the twenty-one Swedish Health Care Regions are starting to request identifiers on primary pack level for medicines. The driver for this request is the switch to new e-health records/systems where, among others, closed loop medication, bed side scanning and improved follow up of medicines will be possible.
One of the health care regions added to their tender documents for procurements, with start date in Q3 2021, that labelling of primary packs will give an advantage in the procurement.

In the beginning of 2021, there was no clear owner for alignment of this topic. The Swedish authorities have neither expressed any clear directions for primary packs. The risks seen from the trade association for the research-based pharmaceutical industry in Sweden (Lif) were that a fragmented model could end up in several regional guidelines for how to identify primary pack and that these guidelines would cover (parts of) the Swedish market where in reality many medicines share pack across the Nordics.
Alignment on this area was seen as crucial to create predictability on the market, both short and long term. Instead of one of the stakeholders in the supply chain taking lead on this Lif proposed to e-VIS Board that e-VIS would lead the coordination and alignment for primary pack identifiers.