Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2016/161Show full title

Article 35 Characteristics of the repositories system

1. Each repository in the repositories system shall satisfy all of the following conditions:

(a) it shall be physically located in the Union;

(b) it shall be set up and managed by a non-profit legal entity established in the Union by manufacturers and marketing authorisation holders of medicinal products bearing the safety features and, where they have chosen to participate, wholesalers and persons authorised or entitled to supply medicinal products to the public;

(c) it shall be fully interoperable with the other repositories composing the repositories system; for the purposes of this Chapter, interoperability means the full functional integration of, and electronic data exchange between repositories regardless of the service provider used;

(d) it shall allow the reliable electronic identification and authentication of individual packs of medicinal products by manufacturers, wholesalers and persons authorised or entitled to supply medicinal products to the public, in accordance with the requirements of this Regulation;

(e) it shall have application programming interfaces able to transfer and exchange data with the software used by wholesalers, persons authorised or entitled to supply medicinal products to the public and, where applicable, national competent authorities;

(f) when wholesalers and persons authorised or entitled to supply medicinal products to the public query the repository for the purposes of verification of authenticity and decommissioning of a unique identifier, the response time of the repository, not considering the speed of the internet connection, shall be lower than 300 milliseconds in at least 95 % of queries. The repository performance shall allow wholesalers and persons authorised or entitled to supply medicinal products to the public to operate without significant delay;

(g) it shall maintain a complete record (‘audit trail’) of all operations concerning a unique identifier, of the users performing those operations and the nature of the operations; the audit trail shall be created when the unique identifier is uploaded to the repository and be maintained until at least one year after the expiry date of the medicinal product bearing the unique identifier or five years after the product has been released for sale or distribution in accordance with Article 51(3) of Directive 2001/83/EC, whichever is the longer period;

(h) in accordance with Article 38, its structure shall be such as to guarantee the protection of personal data and information of a commercially confidential nature and the ownership and confidentiality of the data generated when manufacturers, marketing authorisation holders, wholesalers and persons authorised or entitled to supply medicinal products to the public interact with it;

(i) it shall include graphical user interfaces providing direct access to it to the following users verified in accordance with Article 37(b):

(i)

wholesalers and persons authorised or entitled to supply medicinal products to the public, for the purposes of verifying the authenticity of the unique identifier and decommissioning it in case of failure of their own software;

(ii)

national competent authorities, for the purposes referred to in Article 39;

2. Where the status of a unique identifier on a medicinal product intended to be placed on the market in more than one Member State changes in a national or supranational repository, that repository shall immediately notify the change of status to the hub, except in case of decommissioning by marketing authorisation holders in accordance with Articles 40 or 41.

3. National or supranational repositories shall not allow the upload or storage of a unique identifier containing the same product code and serial number as another unique identifier already stored therein.

4. For each batch of repackaged or relabelled packs of a medicinal product on which equivalent unique identifiers were placed for the purposes of complying with Article 47a of Directive 2001/83/EC, the person responsible for placing the medicinal product on the market shall inform the hub of the batch number or numbers of the packs which are to be repackaged or relabelled and of the unique identifiers on those packs. He shall additionally inform the hub of the batch number of the batch resulting from the repackaging or re-labelling operations and the equivalent unique identifiers in that batch.