McKesson meets compliance at scale with MongoDB

THEIR CHALLENGE

Pivoting from a relational database to scale massively

When federal law required meticulous electronic tracing for prescription medications, McKesson faced an unprecedented digital challenge. The pharmaceutical and healthcare giant needed a new data foundation with the performance, flexibility, and reliability to ensure patient safety and supply chain integrity.

McKesson, the largest drug distributor in the United States, operates at a massive scale, distributing one-third of the country’s pharmaceuticals. The company’s sheer size placed it among the organizations that were most heavily affected by the U.S. Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA). Enacted in 2013 to protect patients from counterfeit or harmful drugs, the DSCSA represented a fundamental shift in industry accountability. By 2025, the regulation had evolved to require wholesalers to develop systems to track the serial numbers of every prescription drug container they had out in the marketplace. When scanned, these serial numbers provide authentication all the way back to the manufacturer.

For McKesson—which distributes over 1.2 billion containers annually—this mandate led to an immense data challenge. The company’s monolithic, Postgres- and SAP-based digital infrastructure was designed to handle the entire supply chain, from receiving, packing, and shipping to customer service. However, McKesson’s scale and complex operational use cases threatened to overwhelm its system. The stakes were incredibly high; failure to comply would keep customers from getting their medications on time and would fail to meet regulatory requirements, and any system latency would have a crippling effect on operations. “The data is just as important as the medication,” said Brian Schmidt, Principal IT Architect at McKesson. “Failure to correctly and efficiently deliver the data along with the medication means that the data cannot be used and will never reach the patients who need it.”

Recognizing its legacy system’s limitations, McKesson made a critical strategic pivot by opting to centralize its supply chain information, processing it in separate workflows. This new architecture required a performant, scalable database that was also flexible enough to handle the unique structure of McKesson’s data. MongoDB Atlas proved to be the perfect fit.

OUR SOLUTION

Using the flexible, high-performance power of MongoDB Atlas for McKesson

To alleviate supply chain bottlenecks—and to scale to meet DSCSA requirements—McKesson created two distinct systems: the Distributed Serial Repository for handling the immense volume of verification calls from 60 warehouses, and the Central Data Repository to manage data for over 350,000 customers daily. McKesson chose MongoDB Atlas as the unified platform to power this new architecture. The database provided a scalable and performant data foundation with integrated services that accelerated development and streamlined operations. What’s more, the flexible document database model of MongoDB Atlas meshed naturally with the hierarchical DSCSA data compared to relational databases.

McKesson’s internal benchmarks confirmed the superior performance of MongoDB Atlas for its specific needs, ensuring the database could handle the intense, real-time demands of the pharmaceutical supply chain better than other possible solutions. MongoDB Atlas was also easily adaptable to McKesson’s requirements to maintain both on-premises and cloud systems. “It allowed our developers to code once and deploy anywhere we needed to make our business successful,” said Schmidt.

Beyond MongoDB’s technology, the strength of McKesson’s partnership with the MongoDB team was a key differentiator. “They not only took the time to understand us, but they were also truly invested in our success,” Schmidt said. “The MongoDB partnership stood out because they were able to pivot when we wanted to pivot, accommodate our needs, and provide leadership when we needed it.”

OUTCOME

Seamless compliance, unprecedented scale, and a foundation for innovation

The tangible benefits were immediate and dramatic. McKesson’s platform handled an explosive overnight surge in demand without a hitch, increasing the number of daily requests it handled by 300 times at launch. “It was so performant, we didn’t even notice,” Schmidt said. “There was no blip on the map. MongoDB Atlas performed fantastically.” The entire migration and go-live process was “remarkably smooth,” according to Upendra Kulkarni, Principal Product Manager at McKesson. “The scale that we achieved with MongoDB is overwhelming,” he said. “It’s a moment we should all be incredibly proud of.”

By using MongoDB, McKesson successfully met the DSCSA deadline, ensuring the integrity of the pharmaceutical supply chain for the 350,000 customers it serves daily. The project’s success means McKesson can reliably process the necessary data to deliver customers the medications they need without delay, cementing the company’s commitment to patient safety. “People who rely on our medication can feel safe that what they’re getting is authenticated and secure,” said Kulkarni.

With its new data foundation firmly in place, McKesson is already using its partnership with MongoDB to drive future innovation, exploring gen AI and other use cases. “MongoDB was key to accelerating our technology journey,” said Schmidt.