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Pa. awards $10.4M contract to track medical marijuana

The company experienced a major hack in January. The state health department said it had been assured that security issues were resolved.

Medical marijuana grows at a New Jersey operation. In Pennsylvania, the state Health Department awarded a major contract on Thursday.
Medical marijuana grows at a New Jersey operation. In Pennsylvania, the state Health Department awarded a major contract on Thursday.Read more
    by Sam Wood, STAFF WRITER
    Published 

Gov. Wolf signed the state's medical marijuana program into law on April 17, 2016. Cannabis has been approved to treat 17 medical conditions including cancer, chronic pain, HIV/AIDS, epilepsy, autism, ALS, and PTSD.

There initially were five bidders but three were disqualified for not meeting basic requirements, according to state documents.

MJ Freeway scored lower on technical merits than its Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based rival, BioTrackTHC, which earned a perfect score. MJ Freeway, however, undercut the competition on price, according to a state scoring document. 

In January, MJ Freeway was the target of a hack that caused the cannabis businesses to lose data and disrupted medical marijuana commerce at dispensaries. 

"The attack was not an accident," MJ Freeway CEO Amy Poinsett said in an interview Thursday. Though there were business interruptions, "no data was decrypted or extracted from the system"  and patient information remained secure, she said.

An unrelated glitch two months earlier disrupted business for many of the 1,000 customers the company serves, according to Marijuana Business Daily.

Pennsylvania's tracking system is an adaptation of software — "essentially an off-the-shelf system," Poinsett said — that was prepared for Nevada's marijuana industry. MJ Freeway is working with two Pennsylvania subcontractors, TreCom Systems Group of Havertown and Premier Personal Healthcare of Bethel Park.