February 2015, President Putin ordered the Health Ministry to develop and implement a system of automated tracking of medicines. Later in 2016, Mr. Shuvalov assigned the Federal Tax Service to implement electronic marketing (RFID) for tracking medicines, goods of light industry, and grocery products in order to fight counterfeiting products on the market. The following implementation of the system for medicines was discussed at the conference hosted by The Ministry of Industry and Trade.

    Therefore, the Association of Russian Pharmaceutical Manufacturers announced its position regarding the issue.

    There are several practices of putting a tracking marker on medicines, including the RFID technologies, using radio frequent markers and DataMatrix, using 2D barcodes.

    The DataMatrix system is being used with respect to international standards and EU practice. Meanwhile, RFID has its negatives. It is not used in any other country because it is impossible to use it for marking foil packages and gel solutions. Also, there are no studies on potential radio magnetic radiation from the reading devices and its effect on a particular medicine. The system is hard to implement and has a high risk of producing an error. Therefore, implementation of the RFID system will increase the cost of packaging and the final product itself while will decrease the export potential. 

    According to ARPM professionals, implementation of the RFID will not meet the current world standards and will negatively affect the development of the Russian pharmaceutical industry. Therefore, ARPM proposes to consider using the DataMatrix marking system.