Last month, My MedRec went global. If you’re not familiar with the app, My MedRec is a free system designed on behalf of pharmaceutical industry representative association Rx&D. The iPhone friendly system helps users track their medications, including dosage, timing and drug information. Additionally it creates an easily shareable data that can be sent to doctors, nurses and pharmacists, ensuring seamless medical care. The app makes a lot of sense in the face of the fact that Canadians are the leading smart phone adopters in the world. As well as having some sort of smart phone in their pocket, most.. READ MORE »
As of October, with the inclusion of New Brunswick, every Canadian province will have a catastrophic drug plan in place. These last resort measures protect families from medical bankruptcy and losing access to life saving treatments. There are slight variations in plans, but New Brunswick is adopting a model with no ceiling on spending for assistance. To qualify, candidates must simply exceed a certain percent of family income in drug spending. For the poorest families, this is 3% and for the wealthiest, payments in excess of 12%, assuring universal coverage for those in need, regardless of their backgrounds. This follows.. READ MORE »
A new drug regulation was recently announced in Canada, this time controlling the packaging. That’s the Plain Language Labelling Initiative, which will be an overhaul of how drugs are described on their boxes and bottles. This new initiative aims at altering guidelines for better clarity. While pharmaceutical quality control can ensure that the contents of a package provide exactly the results they’re supposed to, it’s of equal importance to make sure healthcare professionals and consumers are also picking the right products. That means universal standards to prevent confusion between very similarly named or packaged drugs, oversight that is expected to.. READ MORE »
At the end of May, four companies announced a recall on five drugs commonly sold in Canada. The recall is not about a problem with the medications themselves, as a treatment. Amlodipine, ciprofloxacin, norfloxacin, lamotrigine and telmisartan are all still considered to be safe and effective in their own right. Instead, the recall affects only certain batches and lot numbers. This issue provides a case study for pharmaceutical quality control from the manufacturing side of things. No pharmaceutical company wants the bad publicity of a recall, but this incident also shows the necessary redundancies in pharmaceutical quality assurance. In this.. READ MORE »
