Information sharing infrastructure for pharmaceutical supply chain management in emergency response

Abstract

For an effective and timely acquisition, deployment, and distribution of needed drugs in emergencies, it is crucial to provide the end-to-end visibility of the pharmaceutical supply chain (PSC) to the involved parties. Recently, the Science and Technology Directorate of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has developed a standard-based framework for maintaining and sharing of the emergency data, called Unified Incident Command Decision Support (UICDS). UICDS provides an infrastructure for information sharing among the disparate organizations responding to an emergency. In this paper, we leverage the UICDS infrastructure, and extend it to enable information sharing for pharmaceutical supply chain management in emergency response.