Union Minister for Chemicals & Fertilizers and Health & Family Welfare Dr. Mansukh Mandaviya will grace the occasion as Chief Guest and MoS for Chemicals & Fertilizers and New & Renewable Energy will grace the occasion as Guest of Honour today to commemorate 25 years of National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) at the Dr. Ambedkar International Centre, New Delhi.

Stakeholders from the pharmaceutical and medtech devices industry, central and state governments, Price Monitoring and Resource Units (PMRUs), civil society, patient advocacy groups, etc. from all over the country will participate in the programme.

To mark the occasion, Integrated Pharmaceutical Database Management System 2.0 (IPDMS 2.0), an integrated responsive cloud-based application developed by NPPA with technical support from Centre for Advanced Computing (C-DAC) will be launched.

IPDMS 2.0 is envisaged to optimize synergies in operations in order to promote government’s thrust on ‘Ease of Doing Business’ as it would provide a single window for submissions of various forms as mandated under Drug Price Control Order (DPCO), 2013. It would also enable paperless functioning of NPPA and facilitate the stakeholders to connect with the National Pharma Pricing Regulator from across the country.

Also, Pharma Sahi Daam 2.0 App with updated features will be launched on the occasion. The app has features like speech recognition; search medicines brand/formulation wise; and share features along with consumer complaint handling system. A publication chronicling the 25 years’ journey of NPPA is also proposed to be launched at the inaugural session.

A panel discussion on “Robust Data collection for policy making in Pharmaceutical and Medtech sector” will be conducted. The panel discussion will be chaired by Dr. V. K. Paul, Member Health, NITI Aayog and would be moderated by Satya S. Sundaram, E&Y. The panelists in the discussion will be: Dr. Viranchi Shah, National President, IDMA; Rajiv Mishra, Adviser, Department of Economic Affairs; Dr. V. G. Somani, Drug Controller General of India; Deepti Srivastava, DDG, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation; Himanshu Baid, Chair, CII Medical Devices Committee; Ashish Bhatnagar, Vice President, National Institute of Smart Government; and Saurabh Thukral, Senior Specialist, NITI Aayog.