The National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) has extended the last date by one month for registration of manufacturers under the Ingredient Pharmaceutical Database Management System (IPDMS) for online filing of returns in Form II, III and V under DPCO 2013.

“While the registration process under IPDMS is on, all the major pharma industry associations have sought extension of time beyond the stipulated date of 30.10.2014. After due consideration, it has been decided to extend the date of registration by one month i.e. upto 30.11.2014”, the NPPA said.

Earlier this year, the NPPA in collaboration with the National Informatics Centre (NIC) had developed the IPDMS, with the objective of creating an appropriate mechanism of obtaining market-based data related to drugs. The IPDMS was developed for facilitating on-line submission of mandatory returns/reports under the DPCO, 2013 by manufacturers as defined under 2(1) (n) of the DPCO, 2013.

The NPPA had then asked all the pharma companies in the country to register themselves under IPDMS before October 30 for online filing of returns in Form II, III and V under DPCO 2013.

The launch of IPDMS is of significance because with the transition from DPCO 1995, which followed cost-based mechanism for price fixation, to the DPCO 2013, which follows market-based mechanism for price fixation, reference data and source of market-based data has assumed critical importance. Through this effort, the NPPA in due course wanted to come out with an appropriate mechanism of obtaining market-based data related to drugs.

So far, due to the absence of a robust in-house data base in this regard, the DPCO 2013 has permitted that initially the required market-based data may be sourced from IMS Health subject to necessary validation exercise by the NPPA wherever considered necessary. Whenever the data of IMS Health is not available or found to be inadequate, it would be supplemented by sourcing market based data from Pharma Trac, which like IMS Health is another specialised pharmaceutical market-based data source. In addition to that, data is also obtained from manufacturers directly and from several other secondary published sources.