Economic Evaluation: Advantages of Implementing Drug Track and Trace beyond Health Benefits

Traceability is a valuable strategy to prevent the administration of counterfeit and substandard medicines, but despite being an efficient risk management strategy, it has high implementation and operational costs. An economic evaluation, taken with the identification of risks to be mitigated, potential benefits, related costs, and ways to fund the project implementation and operationalization, can determine the feasibility of a traceability model. This evaluation admits different perspectives depending on the stakeholder. Several countries are working on different traceability and financing models according to identified risks, expected gains, and economic impacts. This opinion paper describes the problem, track and trace models mostly adopted, most used economic evaluation methods in healthcare, and defines the hypothesis that investment return can enable the decision-making for a drug track system implementation.