New Zealand’s Center for Adverse Reactions Monitoring is now moving to a new digital system for collecting and storing reports on adverse drug reactions in the country, decommissioning its nearly 60-year-old database.
The center has worked with medicines regulator Medsafe to develop the new digital database, the first version of which went online in December last year to support adverse event processing for COVID-19 and monkeypox vaccines.
Following their transition to the new digital system, CARM and Medsafe will implement a number of changes to the processing of ADRs:
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Medsafe will now host the new database; it will also be responsible for the initial processing of ADRs.
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CARM experts will now focus on conducting medical reviews of non-routine reports; it will continue to respond to notifications if an alert has been entered into the National Medical Alert System.
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Reporting side effects of medications remains ‘no fault’.
Meanwhile, CARM and Medsafe also store ‘valuable’ information in the current database, which contains details of clinical trials conducted and information received from other organisations. CARM stores historical data in the old database and shares it with Medsafe “as necessary”.
WHY IT MATTERS
CARM was founded in 1965, along with its systems and database. Given the aging nature of the database, CARM and Medsafe felt it was time to move on and develop a new digital database, said Medsafe group manager Chris James. This technology, he added, will enable them to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their drug safety monitoring.
“These changes will improve the turnaround time for processing ADRs, allowing Medsafe and CARM staff to spend more time analyzing reports, which will contribute to better signal detection and overall safety monitoring. It also frees CARM from administrative overhead, allowing their physicians to focus on the valuable role of medically reviewing non-routine reports,” Michael Tatley, director of the New Zealand Pharmacovigilance Center at the University of Otago, further commented on the changes in the processing of side effects.
THE BIG TREND
In other related news, researchers from South Korea recently devised an AI model to predict side effects between prescription drugs and the oral anti-COVID-19 drug Paxlovid. The prediction model called DeepDDI2 was reportedly able to calculate and process a total of 113 types of drug interactions.
The United Kingdom is also using AI to predict side effects of COVID-19 vaccines. In 2020 it is has contracted Genpact UK to develop the said technology.