To commemorate 25 years of existence of National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA), a programme is being organised tomorrow at the Dr. Ambedkar International Centre, Janpath.  Union Minister for Chemicals & Fertilizers and Health & Family Welfare Dr. Mansukh Mandaviya will grace the occasion as Chief Guest. MoS for Chemicals & Fertilizers and New & Renewable Energy will grace the occasion as Guest of Honour. Stakeholders from the Pharmaceutical and Medtech devices industry, Central and State Governments, Price Monitoring and Resource Units (PMRUs), civil society, patient advocacy groups, etc from all over the country will participate in the programme.

To mark the occasion, at the inaugural session, Integrated Pharmaceutical Database Management System 2.0 (IPDMS 2.0), an integrated responsive cloud-based application developed by NPPA with technical support from Centre for Advance Computing (C-DAC) will be launched. IPDMS 2.0 is envisaged to optimize synergies in operations in order to promote Government’s thrust on ‘Ease of Doing Business’ as it would provide a single window for submissions of various forms as mandated under Drug Price Control Order (DPCO),2013. It would also enable paperless functioning of NPPA and facilitate the stakeholders to connect with National Pharma Pricing Regulator from across the country

Also, Pharma Sahi Daam 2.0 App with updated features will be launched on the occasion.  The App has features like speech recognition; search medicines brand/formulation wise; share feature along with consumer complaint handling system.  A publication chronicling the 25 years’ journey of NPPA is also proposed to be launched at the inaugural session.

After the inaugural session, a panel discussion on the topic “Robust Data collection for policy making in Pharmaceutical and Medtech sector” will be conducted. The panel discussion will be chaired by Dr. V.K. Paul, Member Health NITI Aayog and moderated by Shri Satya S. Sundaram, E&Y.  The panelists will be experts drawn from different areas having linkages with the topic under the discussion. The expert panelists in the discussion will be: Dr. Viranchi Shah, National President, IDMA; Shri Rajiv Mishra, Adviser, Department of Economic Affairs; Dr. V. G. Somani, Drug Controller General of India; Ms. Deepti Srivastava, DDG, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation; Shri Himanshu Baid, Chair, CII Medical Devices Committee; Shri Ashish Bhatnagar, Vice President, National Institute of Smart Government; and Shri Saurabh Thukral, Senior Specialist, NITI Aayog. Chairman NPPA will sum up gist of the discussions.

The panelists will be sharing their views on various facets of the topic under discussion with special emphasis on importance of different sources of data in the larger context of making healthcare accessible and affordable. Options for improved data collection, areas of synergy, coordination and collaboration will be identified for drawing up a future roadmap that would help for creation of robust database.

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MV/SK