In the 2nd quarter of 2023, 27 million transactions have been performed in the Latvian Medicines Verification System (LZVS), of which 7 million packages were decommissioned and supplied to patients. During this period, the number of decommissioned packages increased by 4% compared to the corresponding period in 2022.
On June 30, 2023, the Latvian Medicines Verification Organization (LZVO) has granted access to the LZVS to 1206 end-users, including pharmacies, hospitals, wholesalers, and healthcare institutions. Over the past year, the number of LZVS end-users has stabilized, with an average of 5-10 new user accounts created each month, and accounts of those end-users without valid medication procurement permits or pharmaceutical licenses have been closed.
Thanks to the precise work of the participants in the Latvian system, the number of alerts has significantly decreased over time. Like in the previous quarter, in the 2nd quarter of 2023, the proportion of alerts of transactions reached 0.01%. This indicator shows a stable operation of the LZVS, and it is significantly lower than the average indicator of the member states of the system – 0.19%. Latvian end-users on average receive one alert in three days, which is half less than in the same period a year ago.
Number of national alerts in relation to number of total transactions
When summarizing the most frequent alert codes in the 2nd quarter of 2023, 99% of all were unknown serial number, batch ID mismatch, property is already set on pack, batch ID unknown and pack is already inactive.
During this period, most of alerts were generated in pharmacies (71%): 68% were related to technical errors in scanners and/or software operations, 29% were caused by repeated decommissioning of a split pack after 10 days, repeated status change of a split package and other procedural errors, and only 3% were linked to errors by manually entering the unique identifier data of the medicinal product packaging. Alerts were also generated in pharmaceutical wholesalers (11%) and in hospitals and other healthcare institutions (9%), where the causes of alerts were like those in pharmacies. LZVO, in collaboration with IT developers and end-users of the system, continues to work on errors resolution to further reduce the number of alerts in the future.
Alerts by origin and reason Q2, 2023
