New Technologies and Solutions in Other Industries

In the 21stcentury, several technologies are changing how we spend our time, how we communicate and interact with each other, how we shop, how we get our entertainment, how we arrange our travel, how we work, and even how we find new friends. These technologies include:

  • Internet-of-things

  • Smart phones

  • Crowd sourcing

  • Big data

  • Artificial intelligence

IoT inSite and its business partners have developed, patented, and deployed Internet-of-Things technology on more than two billion discrete items. The crowd-sourced big data generated by people interacting with these items enables the real-time tracking of legal and illegal product markets around the world.

Application to Opioids

This same system enables society to attack the opioid crisis in fundamentally new and different ways.

The system helps our society to dramatically decrease the devastation to people and the economy from the opioid crisis. The system enables timely and tangible action to be taken:

  • Patients receive help, at the most critical juncture, to prevent over-medication and new addiction.

  • New patient accountabilities for dispensed opioids are established, including responsibility to store or dispose of unused pills.

  • Health care providers can track usage and interact with patients in-between visits.

  • Social workers can support and respond in real-time to those who are recovering from addiction.

  • Trafficked prescriptions, illegally produced opioids, and fentanyl can be tracked down fast so that offending drug dealers can be quickly jailed. 

The system provides the following benefits:

  • Focused police resources where illegal opioid activity is occurring

  • Constriction of the supply of illegal opioids.

  • Reduction of the number of new opioid addicts.

  • Reduction of deaths from opioid overdoses.

  • Reduction of the economic drag on the economy from opioid addiction.

DSCSA Cannot Fix the Opioid Crisis

The Drug Quality and Security Act (DQSA), was enacted by Congress on November 27, 2013. Title II of DQSA, the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA), is an Internet-of-Things initiative to improve safety by preventing the distribution of counterfeit and diverted prescription drugs. However, it should be noted that:

  • The opioid crisis has little to do with the distribution of counterfeit and diverted drugs through legitimate channels, and therefore, the implementation of DSCSA will have little effect on the opioid crisis.

  • The DSCSA facilitates the automated dispersion of important and potentially sensitive security related drug data (product name, formulation, expiry date and lot or control number).

  • The data generated by scanning of the DSCSA is likely to be stored in different formats and owned by a different data monopolist at each stage of the product distribution. Purchasing this incompatible data from each stage and integrating it to see the big picture is likely to be costly and time consuming.

The DSCSA is becoming a compliance program to fulfill the single mandate of ensuring that legally distributed drugs are not corrupted with counterfeit or diverted drugs. In comparison, IoT inSite’s system is a broad multifunctional system that enables solving a variety of challenges, including visibility of legal and illegal opioid markets.