CDSCO's New IT Portal To Track Medicines End-To-End

New Delhi, Nov 17 (KNN) The Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) has developed an integrated IT platform to bring in transparency and uniformity in all related processes and to create confidence in domestic and international markets.

Once launched, the portal will be able to track products right from the stage of procuring raw material, to supply chain, and finally patterns of consumption categorised by quantity, area, and season. Apart from manufacturers, distributors and retailers will also need to upload their invoices on the portal for this end-to-end tracking to become possible, as per a report in the Indian Express.

As per reports, the government has called for software service providers to develop the system. Once operational, all other portals used by drug regulators will be discontinued. The portal will become a single window for all drug regulatory activities.

"The idea to create a unified portal was first proposed during a Chintan Shivir (brainstorming session) with stakeholders earlier this year. Now, a team has been formed that is dedicated to working on developing the portal and get it up and running," reported Indian Express citing a senior official.

The brainstorming session in February brought all stakeholders together to discuss ways to improve the regulatory framework after a series of incidents came to light where Indian manufactured syrups were found to be contaminated and were even linked to deaths of children in the Gambia and Uzbekistan. 

Another important function of the portal will be to share information about spurious and not of standard quality medicines with state regulators to tackle the problem of the movement of these drugs across state boundaries.

The portal will also help improve inspections by assigning inspectors at random to various sites in a masked manner, randomised allocation of work such as processing applications for licenses and approvals/and assigning QR codes to samples collected and reports to allow verification at every stage of the process.

(KNN Bureau)