Liz Cuneo: Switching gears a little bit to some bottlenecks in the supply chain that we talked about. You said that bottlenecks happen or can happen at the dispensing level, maybe at pharmacies, clinics, hospitals, doctor's office. Can you explain briefly why that is and if there is a solution to stop the problem?
Ullrich Mayeski: Yeah, that's a fantastic question... dispensers have a unique challenge within the supply chain, because they're patient facing, right? They have to interact with the patients when they come in to be able to provide them the medication that they need for the condition that they're receiving it for. And so they have a wide range of responsibilities within their environment and so if product arrives at their pharmacy and the appropriate data is not associated with that product, it can go into quarantine and it can't get dispensed to a patient.
And that's a challenging situation from a pharmacist that wants to be able to provide care to that customer, their patient. So, some of these bottlenecks that happen are really a result of at the outset, not having thorough policies and procedures for how you're going to administer your DSCSA requirements or your scanning requirements as product comes into the pharmacy.
What I mean by that is what happens when there's an issue? When data isn't associated with the product, when an order is missing product and that product has to be quarantined. What do you do?
So one of the ways to mitigate that challenge for dispensers is to make sure that they have a plan for how they're gonna communicate with their upstream trading partners. You don't wanna figure out how you're gonna do that at the time an issue happens. You want to be able to have a policy or procedure in place for how you're going to systemically connect with your trading partners to make sure that you can resolve any issues that happen.
