Guess who is helping the government keep drug prices in check

Daybreak

So far, buying medicines in India has been a complete minefield. Allow me to elaborate with the help of a completely plausible hypothetical scenario. Say you catch the flu one day and need 75 mg of the antiviral drug Oseltamivir. More often than not, we don’t really check the price tag of these drugs. But what if I told you the prices can swing anywhere between Rs 30 and Rs 125 per capsule, depending on the manufacturer and the doctor prescribing it.

Now, variable pricing is not really a revelation. It’s a pretty common practice. The government caps the price of nearly 400 essential drugs through the National List of Essential Medicines. But that’s where the oevrsight ends. Generally, non-essential drugs remain outside this price cap.

The National Health Authority, the body which runs India’s public health insurance scheme, Ayushman Bharat, is now looking for digital pharmacy partners to promote pricing transparency. The aim is to tackle this overcharging crisis.

So in September, it went ahead and enlisted Marg ERP, a leading provider of pharmacy inventory software as one such partner. Now Kaushal Shah, founder of Evitalrx, revealed that even his cloud-based pharma software firm is on track to join the initiative in the coming weeks.

But here’s the thing. This one click solution is still a long way off.

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