The health ministry and the central drugs regulator are developing an online platform, where all chemists and druggists will have to register.
What is the health ministry’s decision?
The anti-microbial resistance is on the rise due to arbitrary consumption of antibiotics.
So the government decided to work on a track-and-trace mechanism through the centralised portal.
The identity of doctors prescribing any medicine must be part of the database.
Patients’ profiles will have to be included in the case of high-risk drugs and narcotics.
The notice also says no habit-forming drug can be exported against internet orders.
Stockists and retailers will also be required to submit data on the stock they procure.
Stocks returned to the manufacturer would also be updated on the centralised platform.
Drug manufacturers will have to register themselves and update sales of drugs to distributors and wholesalers, with expiry dates.
The government had earlier introduced bar-coding on primary, secondary and tertiary packs of drugs meant to be exported.
However, this mechanism was not made mandatory for domestic circulation.
The notice suggests details of all sales have to be updated by chemists from time to time.
Hospitals and other clinical establishments or other authorised persons, both in the public and the private sector, shall be required to enter details of medicines dispensed or distributed, issued or made available to patients.
In urban areas, updates have to be in real-time. In rural and remote regions, pharmacies will be allowed to upload data once every fortnight.
This will help assess whether slashing the prices of drugs does ensure accessibility to medicines and that nobody sells above the level fixed by the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority.
