The Indian Internet Pharmacy
Association today released the ‘Self-regulation Code of Conduct’ for the
e-pharmacy sector, an attempt to adhere to the highest professional standards and to have
proper safeguards to ensure consumer’s health and safety.
According to the ‘Self-regulation Code of
Conduct’, E-pharmacy will process scheduled medicines only against a valid copy
of prescription (physical or scanned) of a registered medical
practitioner and ensure that no schedule X and other sensitive habit forming
medicines are processed through their platform.
“E-pharmacy must ensure that the medicines are dispensed through
licensed pharmacies only. They
must make reasonable effort to ensure that all
the pharmacy partners (before facilitating the
sale of any medicines through such pharmacy partners) are duly registered under
the Drugs And Cosmetics
Act/ Rules,” the code of conduct said.
The player must make suitable arrangements
to ensure that the medicines are packed, transported and delivered in such a
way that their integrity,quality, and effectiveness are preserved, it said.
Besides, e-pharmacy players must partner with government for any recall
of medicines and collect
adverse events of medicines (consumer reports) and comply to submit them to National Centre for
Pharmacovigilance.
It also said the online pharmacy sector must ensure a proper mechanism
is in place to address any
queries or grievances that the customer may have and an ombudsman commission be appointed to address any public grievance.
The Indian Internet Pharmacy Association (IIPA) is body formed by online
pharmacy retailers in the country.
The code of conduct was released under the ambit of FICCI today.
“We need to embrace technology, in both offline and online models. There
is a great opportunity to
take this ecosystem ahead by leveraging the India
stack using the existing infrastructure of Aadhaar and Digi-locker to maintain
the repository of prescription, health records and monitor the dispensing of sensitive medicines.
“All pharmacies, online or offline, should check prescriptions on this
locker,” Arvind Gupta, Head of Digital India Foundation said.
Prashant Tandon, CEO and founder of 1mg
mentioned that this group of progressive e-pharmacies have come up with code of
conduct in the interest of consumers and as a group they look forward to productive engagement with
the regulator to help make the Indian pharmacy sector a model sector.
Source:
The
Hindu- Buisness Line November 21, 2016 -NEW DELHI
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/info-tech/code-of-conduct-for-epharmacy-sector-launched/article9370894.ece
