Identification of medications is essential for both patients and healthcare professionals. It allows them to become thoroughly familiar with their drugs, understand interactions and side effects, determine the correct dosage and route of administration, and more.
Identification of medications by name or visual identification is vital for patient safety, but it’s not always straightforward or fast.
Pillbox
Pillbox is an online tool created by the National Library of Medicine and its partner Food and Drug Administration to assist people in identifying medications. Users enter a medication’s physical characteristics, and potential matches are displayed along with links to additional resources.
This tool is used by medical personnel, law enforcement officers and others who need to quickly identify solid dosage medications. It combines data from the FDA’s DailyMed and RxNorm databases with high-resolution photographs of pill-form drugs.
Manufacturers design pill colors, sizes and shapes with embossments to help patients and families quickly identify their medications. Additionally, these markings help prevent mix-ups at the pharmacy.
In this research, we employed a neural network to recognize text in pill boxes. The system employed the DBNet model to detect text areas within an image and then sent these areas directly to CRNN text recognition algorithm for improved localization accuracy and speed compared to other methods.
National Drug Code
The National Drug Code (NDC) is a 10-digit, 3-segment number that serves as the universal product identifier for human drugs in the United States. It tells you who manufactured, repackager or distributed the drug, its strength, dosage form and formulation as well as its commercial package size.
The NDC (National Drug Code) is used for a number of purposes, such as reporting prescription drug information in pharmacy transactions, coding it within clinical information systems and processing prescription drug claims. Furthermore, it’s published by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in a database called the NDC Directory that contains submitted data for finished drugs.
Recently, the FDA released a proposed rule to standardize the format of NDCs. If adopted, this would change NDCs from being 12 digits long with an uniform format to 12 digits consisting of 3 segments: a 6-digit labeler code, 4-digit product code and 2-digit package code.
Lot Number
Lot numbers are unique identifiers for batch-produced products. They assist you in tracking production processes and quality issues, as well as providing end-to-end inventory cycle visibility.
Furthermore, they give you the capacity to track defective product batches and take appropriate actions in order to minimize returns and boost customer satisfaction. Doing this can save costly product recalls and speedily address safety concerns.
Additionally, lot number tracking can assist in prioritizing first in, first out (FIFO) inventory rotation to eliminate waste and minimize recalled products. Doing this helps maximize your raw materials utilization and lower product costs.
Lot numbers enable pharmaceutical companies to identify the specific batch of medication produced. These identifiers should be found either on the bottle itself or beneath its expiration date.
Manufacturer
Medications are essential for healthcare and the lives of patients. They can be prescribed by a doctor or pharmacist to address an illness, or taken as an overall preventive measure.
Manufacturing drugs is a highly technical and specialized process that necessitates skilled personnel with knowledge in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).
However, U.S. Pharmacopeia’s Medicine Supply Map indicates that a shortage of skilled workers is one major factor limiting manufacturers’ capacity to manufacture medicines, due to supply interruptions and shortages it monitors.
Furthermore, drug manufacturing is an integral component of global supply chains, meaning medications may originate in one country and be distributed to another. This presents logistical difficulties and high costs that restrict access to necessary medicines in low-income countries.
