Current scenario and future prospects of adverse drug reactions (ADRs)
monitoring and reporting mechanisms in the rural areas of the India
Abstract
Pharmacovigilance (PV) deals with the detection, collection, assessment,
understanding and prevention of adverse effects associated with the
drugs. The objective of PV is to ensure safety of the medicines and
patients by monitoring and reporting of all adverse drug reactions
(ADRs) associated with prescribed medicine usage. Findings have
indicated that about 0.2-24% of hospitalization cases are due to ADRs
out of which 3.7% of patients have lethal ADRs. The reasons includes
number of prescribing drugs, increased new drugs in the market, and
inadequate PV system for ADRs monitoring, lack of awareness and
knowledge about ADRs reporting. Serious ADRs leads to enhanced hospital
stay, increased treatment cost, risk of death, and many medical and
economic consequences. Therefore, ADR reporting at its first instance is
important to avoid further harmful effects of the prescribed drugs. In
India, the rate of ADR reporting is less than 1% whereas worldwide it
is 5% due to lack of awareness about PV and ADR monitoring among
healthcare providers and patients. Spontaneous reporting is the most
commonly used PV method to report ADRs in both urban and rural areas of
India. Evidences revealed that there is not any effective ADR reporting
mechanisms developed in rural areas causing underreporting of ADR thus
increasing threat to the rural population. Hence, PV and ADR reporting
awareness among healthcare professionals and patients,
telecommunication, telemedicine, use of social media and electronic
medical records, and artificial intelligence are the potential
approaches for prevention, monitoring and reporting of ADR in rural
areas.