By Dear Well-wishers,
As we near the end of yet another happening year, I warmly express my hearty wishes to you and yours, for the forthcoming New Year, through this November 2019 edition of Oviya MedSafe‘s newsletter! I have always believed, albeit in a metaphorical sense, that every end is in some way a precursor of another new beginning. Extrapolating it literally, I am abundantly hopeful that 2020 has loads of good tidings for all of us.
As an organization, Oviya MedSafe ventured into the pharmacovigilance domain at a time when end-to-end pharmacovigilance services were unaffordably expensive for small and medium-sized operators in the pharmaceutical industry. Ever since its birth in 2012, Oviya MedSafe has been constantly striving to make pharmacovigilance a more economical exercise for such cost-conscious companies. It may be surprising that such a significant and rather vital issue like Patient Safety in the context of Drug Safety was getting so little importance in the pharmaceutical industry despite it carrying a regulatory mandate for them. But, Oviya MedSafe was able to understand their hesitation because most companies under this category were almost exclusively generic in nature and they saw no overt benefit in building up their pharmacovigilance departments in order to study the safety profiles of drugs that were not developed by them.
It was clear that “a perceived lack of incentive” prevailed. Although one could rightly argue that pharmaceutical companies should be held accountable for adverse events occurring with the use of their medicinal products, this was the stark reality. It was in this context that I spoke in conferences and wrote in a past edition of our newsletter about the rationale I conceived about the potential business benefits a generic drugmaker could beget by performing pharmacovigilance properly, beyond achieving regulatory compliance. Express Pharma, a leading pharmaceutical industry magazine based in India, published this as an invited article titled ‘Pharmacovigilance as a value addition for the pharma industry‘ which I hear is one of the most widely read write-ups on this rare but essential topic.
From a practical point of view, the cost of pharmacovigilance support lent to the industry comprises not only the professional charges for the activities performed on behalf of the client but also the license fees for all the technology products used (including but not limited to the pharmacovigilance software database). While Oviya MedSafe always treaded the path of being client-friendly in terms of pricing our services, we did have challenges in getting the legacy technology partners to lower their costs for generic companies in our early days. Fortunately, in due course, we identified technology partners who shared our wavelength and our partnerships with them permitted us to widen our client base thanks to the overall cost reduction that made Oviya MedSafe attractive. Moving further, we have continued signing up with more agile technology partners possessing cutting edge expertise so that we will be able to offer a variety of integrated pharmacovigilance solutions for our clients to choose from, with no compromise in quality or compliance in any of them. This has been possible because we are functional consultants for technology companies focusing on the pharmacovigilance domain and therefore we fully understand the products available in the market as well as those in the pipeline.
To summarize, we at Oviya MedSafe have left no stone unturned in our pursuit of excellence in pharmacovigilance. We believe that our broad-based knowledge in the domain has equipped us to shape our pharmacovigilance processes as lean as possible, which in turn have always been remarkably advantageous for our clients.
Before signing off, I wish to share that I have been invited to speak at the DIA Pharmacovigilance & Risk Management Strategies Conference 2020 that is to be held at Washington DC from 27th to 29th January 2020 and I hope I will get an opportunity to catch up with some of you at the event.
Keen to meet you soon through our December 2019 newsletter,
With thanks & regards,
Dr J Vijay Venkatraman
MBBS, F. Diab., MBA, FPIPA (UK)
Managing Director & CEO,
Oviya MedSafe Pvt Ltd,
Coimbatore, India
Phone: +91-422-2444442
Director,
Oviya MedSafe UK Ltd,
London, UK
Phone: +44-8452-733839
Web: www.oviyamedsafe.com
Mail: info@oviyamedsafe.com
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