IQVIA for EFCG – Executive summary

23 Jun 2021

In 2019, EFCG has approached the Commission to alert them about the risk of future shortages of medicines, based on several supply incidents suffered by our members, European suppliers of APIs, excipients and their precursors. These incidents occurring upstream of the Pharmaceutical supply Chain (PSC) were due largely to the reliance of this PSC on raw materials sourced from non-EU countries, in particular from India and China.
During the same period, some EU countries (Germany, France, the Netherlands, etc…) also had to deal with shortages of some of their essential medicines, mostly imported from Asia.

We presented the European Commission with a set of proposals to mitigate this risk and they approached this issue very seriously, especially since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic brought this topic to the forefront.
In order They have asked EFCG to supply a report to systematically identify and assess vulnerabilities of the PSC in Europe, with a special accent on the missing technologies and other gaps.

Such information was not readily available and therefore a systematic data collection approach was needed. Due to the sensitive nature of the information to be collected, EFCG has commissioned IQVIA to collect this information, as they are widely considered as the world’s leading provider of data and analytics for the pharmaceutical industry. Qualitative and quantitative data surveys were conducted on a representative sample of supply chain actors, was submitted to in order to provide an inventory of the current situation and provide strategic recommendations for the future.

The document presented here is the executive summary of this study, the full version has been submitted to the EU Commission in January 2021.