Know the effects without the side-effects

The Drug Information Centre of the Maharashtra State Pharmacy Council has proved valuable to doctors, pharmacists and the people at large. Divya Nair takes a closer look at the centre.

The Maharashtra State Pharmacy Council’s (MSPC) Drug Information Centre (DIC) received a call, back in the year 2003. It was from a retail pharmacist, from a remote village of Maharashtra, curious to find out the reason for the ban on Phenformin—an anti-diabetic. “The caller told me that he was informed that the drug led to lactic acidosis,” recalls Dr Sampada Patvardhan, in-charge of the MSPC’s DIC. At that time, the DIC had just been initiatied. “The call revealed the curiosity of a small-town retail pharmacist and was an indication that we were headed in the right direction,” she says.

The DIC is an internationally established concept in clinical practice. In India, however, it has taken shape only recently. The Maharashtra State Pharmacy Council’s centre is the third DIC in India and the first one in the West zone. It provides drug counselling to doctors, pharmacists and the common man.

What’s in a DIC

DIC is a facility specialising in providing independant and unbiased drug information in written and verbal form to healthcare professionals and patients for optimisation of drug use. “Information is key to preventing medication errors. MSPC’s DIC will lead to enhanced quality of patient care and thus improved patient outcome,” states Patvardhan.

Due to the rapid advancement in medical and biological science, the information requirement of professionals has risen exponentially. “There are approximately 1 lakh formulations being marketed by around 20,000 companies,” cites Patvardhan. Ironically, the rational selection and utilisation of drugs has become more complex than ever, with limited access and authenticity of the information.

According to Patvardhan, the conventional method of obtaining drug information is through medical representatives or the product literature provided by pharma manufacturers, which may be incomplete or biased. Given the vast range of formulations, an objective source of information is critical. “The information at the DIC is neutral, because of the approach to recommend drugs solely by their generic names and not brand identities,” she explains.

The information furnished by the council’s DIC is retrieved mainly from the internationally reputed database Micromedex’s Drugdex, USA. “Micromedex is an authentic database, with extensive and indexed information,” says Anil Patankar, registrar, MSPC. “Drugdex is just one component of Micromedex that is released as quarterly updates to MSPC, against a heavy subscription.”

Mission with a Cause

The DIC does not charge for the information it dispenses. “The preamble of the Pharmacy Act, 1948, under which the MSPC falls, states that it will work for the betterment of the pharmacists,” explains Patankar. The entire cost of operations is therefore being borne by the MSPC.

The MSPC has published two booklets that are based on the WHO model formulary. These constitute a book on ‘Drug-Drug Interactions’ (which explains the reaction between two drugs taken in combination) and the self-explanatory, ‘Drugs harmful in pregnancy’.

“Science is changing every day and doctors need updates too. Competition and need for knowledge is only going to be on the surge. In such times, the DIC will become the backbone of information,” Patvardhan claims.

At your Service

The council’s DIC will provide updates on drug profiles, drugs that are going out of patent, updates from USFDA and the World Health Organisation’s Drug Information Bulletin. Updated inputs about banned, recalled and restricted drugs in the US and the other developed countries, as well as updates on the National Pharmacovigilance Programme are also available with the DIC. MSPC’s other plans include training pharma personnel on post-marketing pharmacovigilance, editing and reviewing of pack inserts of new products, and providing complete history or journey of a particular drug, from its initial stage to the marketing of the drug.

“Drug related queries can be sent to DIC either by e-mail, phone or post. People are also welcome to visit the office if they would like to do it in person,” says Patvardhan. In the past year, the DIC has responded to 550 medicine-related queries, which have then been documented in a structured format with the help of specially developed software for documentation of the queries.

The centre has also prepared and distributed anti-tobacco stickers for hundreds of retail pharmacy outlets as part of its anti-tobacco campaign. “Many tobacco addicts have called up DIC seeking information about tobacco quitting procedures and some have also shown willingness to undergo the required treatment to quit this deadly addiction,” adds Patvardhan.

Forty eight per cent of the DIC’s queries have been from doctors. “The pharmacists constitute 41 per cent, and the common man forms 10 per cent of people seeking information from DIC,” states Patvardhan. It is people from the regulatory agencies that constitute the rest one percent.

DIC caters not only to the registered pharmacists but also to the doctor fraternity and the common man. The registered pharmacists’ group includes retail pharmacists, also called as community pharmacists, hospital pharmacists, pharmacists who are pursuing R&D or academics, and pharmacists who occupy positions in regulatory bodies like the FDA, DCGI or the Drug Control Department.

For the Masses

The common man can avail of both the DIC publications and the DIC services. “We provide peripheral or supportive information to a person seeking answers, but as a matter of principle, we will not interfere with the doctors’ prescription,” maintains Patvardhan categ-orically. There is a possibility that people chance on a drug or a combination prescribed to them, that may lead to an adverse reaction (ADR). “In such cases, we suggest that people seek advice from multiple sources about the medical problem. There is also the government approved National Pharmacovigi-lance Programme (NPP) for registering any complaints,” she says.

“We are not going to antagonise the doctor fraternity through DIC, because that is not going to achieve anything, except confusing the patient,” stresses Patvardhan. She, however, indicates that the DIC has received WHO funding to carry out two short projects for doctors and community pharmacists, through which they plan to train 50 general practitioners and 150 pharmacists about the rational use of drugs.

The centre has also started lectures on ‘Spurious and Counterfeit Drugs’ for community pharmacists to increase their understanding of this menace present in the Indian pharma market. Apart from this, the MSPC is conducting refresher courses for the registered pharmacists in the state.

divya@expresspharmapulse.com