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In order to make pharmacists more equipped to counsel patients on adverse drug reactions (ADRs), Maharashtra State Pharmacy Council (MSPC) has created its own indigenous CD based interactive software called as Drug Interaction Checker for Prescription (DICP) to detect drug to drug interactions.
This comes as a welcome change with the recent incidents of adverse drug reactions (ADR) in 38 women at BMC run Bhabha Hospital, Kurla and at Rajawadi Hospital in Vidyavihar East after being administered a variant combination of two Schedule H1 antibacterial antibiotics - ceftriaxone and cefotaxime recently.
Drug information has a great importance in therapy as pharmacists are the best source of drug information. This software will enable the pharmacist to check the prescription for any major drug interaction.
Introduced by the MSPC's Drug Information Centre (DIC), DICP will fill the gap in terms of information on Drug to Drug Interaction and is more relevant in India as drug information helps minimise death due to adverse effect of drugs. Many patients die due to drug effects because in India there is no system in place to identify the reason of death. In developed countries, up to 30 per cent patient die due to drug side effects but the scenario is more grave in India.
In this easy to use software in the form of a Compact Disk, thousands of brands with corresponding generic drug names are loaded in computer system as a database.
Message appears on screen, once the prescription entry is made. The software follows a step by step process in which Step 1 provides for entering prescription by brand/generic names in DICP, Step 2 provides an option called as Generate Interactions and Step 3 provides for all possible drug interactions in the given prescription with indications flashing on the computer screen like Red indicating hazardous, Blue indicating moderate in severity and green indicating clinically not significant. Thus, any adverse drug reaction can be nipped in bud in the first place.
DICP is useful for pharmacist working in pharmacies, hospitals or any other appropriate centers. It currently comprises of five drug classes - Antihypertensive, Antibiotics, Antianginal, Antiasthematics and Antihyperlipedemic.
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