Challenges in the management of Pharma's product information

Ensuring that medicine information is up to date across the supply chain, can be challenging and time-consuming for Pharma. Especially considering that product information is published through an extensive range of sources, all of which need to be regularly updated.

In addition, there is much more to medicine information than SmPCs and Patient Information Leaflets (PILs). Product pricing, packaging, and storage information for instance, are fundamental to making medicines available via hospitals and pharmacies, and coding information enables its prescription.

If anything fails in the process, interruptions or delays in the flow of Pharma's information through the supply chain can mean that recently updated adverse drug reactions are unavailable when an enquiry is answered by a helpline service, or missing product information can impact its visibility, keeping it from being prescribed.

What is product information in healthcare?

Product information enables the safe prescription, administration, and use of medicines by healthcare professionals and patients, and it is fundamental to making medicines available, via hospitals and pharmacies, for example.

The most commonly known documents are SmPCs and PILs (also known as Safety related clinical information or Regulated Safety Information -RSI), but product information encompasses much more, including:

• Packaging information
• Company information
• Product & packaging images
• Form/Route/Pack size
• Pricing
• Product coding – ordering and prescribing codes
• Transport and storage conditions

Key supply chain stakeholders

To better understand how important the distribution of Pharma's medicines information through the supply chain is, let’s look at all the different stakeholders that require access to it: 

• Wholesaler & Distributors
• NHS – bodies such as the Commercial Medicines Unit, the Business Services Authority, NICE, MHRA
• C+D Data, BNF, MIMS, FDB 
• Customers
• Marketing and logistical teams
• GP & Pharmacy IT providers - Prescribing and Dispensing software
• Dedicated informational call centres 

Pharma has the complicated task of keeping everyone, from their own personnel to the different stakeholders they’re working with, up to date with the latest version of their product information, presented in the right format and in a timely manner. Not an easy task, as the information usually sits with different departments, in different spreadsheets, and the updates are done manually.

Working closely with all the key actors in the industry, Datapharm has created a single source of truth solution to centralise, manage, standardise, enrich, and efficiently distribute product information to all stakeholders [Blog]. 

Read more about the emc market access solution, with a fully auditable, seamlessly embedded product information management system, or watch our webinar to learn more about the state of product information management in the UK today.

Contact us for a free demo today.