The Food and Drugs Authority (FDA) and the Ghana Community Network Services Limited (GCNet) have launched an upgraded version of the e-MDA portal for the domestic pharmaceutical market.
The e-MDA is an online portal for the submission and approval of permits, exemptions, certificates and letter of commitment for imported drugs.
The upgrades relate to software changes undertaken to capture detailed information on medicines that are imported into Ghana with reference to specifications like type of medicine described by the product name, molecule name; quantity and value of medicines being imported, which earlier reportedly could not be tracked.
The capturing process, DAILY GUIDE gathered, involves the registration of medicines using the HS Code to collect information on certain details of pharmaceutical products.
Upon the capture of information on each medicine by the FDA, a registration is to be assigned and the information used to also generate the European Pharmaceutical Market Research Association (EphMRA) Code.
DAILY GUIDE understands that specific software changes to the e-MDA portal include the creation of a separate field for the FDA registration.
Speaking at the launch on Thursday in Accra, Deputy Operations Manager of GCNet, Eben Egmann, said the portal would give all importers in the industry who require exemptions, permit and letter of commitment to make their requests online through clearing agents.
He stated that details about the origin, value, quantity and type of pharmaceutical products imported into the country would be captured on the Pharmaceutical Market Information portal.
Technical Advisor, Export Trade Development at the Ministry of Trade and Industry, Gerald Nyarko-Mensah, in a statement indicated that the launch of the portal was necessitated by the desire to improve the capture of critical data on imported pharmaceutical products into the country.
“Prior to this development, it was obvious the capture of information on pharmaceuticals in terms of their quantity and value per the HS Code for classification did not make much meaning in terms of data and statistics for health policy makers, regulators, the public health community, pharmaceutical manufacturers, or potential investors into the pharmaceutical sector because HS Codes tend to be broad and they convey no information about the therapeutic use of the medicines,” according to him.
“The capture of the relevant data on pharmaceutical products make it useful to users and facilitate easy access by industry stakeholders for the purposes of planning and decision-making,” he said.
BY Melvin Tarlue