Dear Well-wishers,

I am surprised that April 2017 has passed so soon and the corresponding edition of Oviya MedSafe’s monthly newsletter is already due, even as I continue to respond to those of you who have been heartily congratulating us on Oviya MedSafe’s 5th Anniversary festivities, which I covered in detail in our March 2017 newsletter.

Today, Oviya MedSafe stands tall as a specialized, methodical and trustworthy organization in the domain of Global Pharmacovigilance. At this juncture, I look back with pride at the road Oviya MedSafe has travelled thus far and relish the fact that we have reached where we are today not only because of our perseverant dedication to pharmacovigilance as a science but also because we were constantly innovating ourselves as a boutique consultancy firm to address the knowledge and affordability deficit in the pharmaceutical industry, in terms of pharmacovigilance services. I wanted to take this opportunity to dwell upon a visionary moment which came true and thereby resulted in a major strength for Oviya MedSafe, only to be adopted subsequently by many other organizations in the pharmaceutical industry.

Way back in 2012 when I founded Oviya MedSafe, I used to encounter quite a lot aspiring entrepreneurs who wanted to set up firms to offer pharmacovigilance services. Any discussion with such colleagues used to begin with the point that upfront investments for procuring drug safety software database licenses were vital prerequisites for such an organization to begin operating. As a conscientious pharmacovigilance professional, I had always felt that possessing strong functional expertise in pharmacovigilance was of much more importance for a consulting organization rather than just having the gold standard drug safety software database in place. Of course, electronic databasing and/or reporting had already become the norm by then, particularly in developed countries. While I was confident of building a robust drug safety team at Oviya MedSafe which could provide services at lesser costs, I sensed that investing in expensive software databases which were considered market leaders would eventually skyrocket the end cost to our clients, especially small and medium-sized pharmaceutical companies, thereby making our proposals less attractive to them in terms of pricing. But, I also understood that not having a pharmacovigilance database or using a non-validated one would simply make us a technologically outdated organization.

My quest for the best of both worlds ended when I identified a pre-configured, pre-validated, E2B-compliant and 21 CFR Part 11-compliant hosted human pharmacovigilance software database system known as PV247 – a product of UK-based Assured Information Systems Ltd, now part of the France-based Ennov group. Oviya MedSafe’s partnership with Assured was publicized in April 2014 following a meeting I had with Dr Alan K Rawling (the then Managing Director of Assured) during my visit to the UK earlier that year. I cherish the good memories of my conversations with Dr Rawling whose business philosophy was in perfect harmony with that of mine. As expected, our alliance grew to be a successful one, although Dr Rawling was unfortunately not alive to see it. Today, many organizations that provide pharmacovigilance services have entered into such strategic relationships with multiple drug safety database systems, especially in developing countries which are beginning to adopt E2B systems. However, Oviya MedSafe’s preferential pact with Assured was the window for the pharmaceutical industry in India and the Asia Pacific region to consider adopting lesser known yet robust drug safety databases beyond the renowned expensive ones. Our novel approaches thus enabled us to render end-to-end pharmacovigilance services not only for India and emerging markets but also for compliance with the pharmacovigilance mandates of well-established global regulatory agencies including the US FDA.

Back to the present, I wish to spotlight the 2017 edition of the UK Pharmacovigilance Day conference, which I have been chairing since its inception in the year 2015. I eagerly look forward to travelling to London for this conference which has to its credit a galaxy of reputed speakers across all stakeholders of pharmacovigilance in the UK. The conference has been designed to cover a wide variety of topics ranging from BrExit, technological breakthroughs, automation, viewpoints of patients, etc in the context of pharmacovigilance. I take great pleasure in inviting you to register for this knowledge-packed conference.

Apart from the conference, I hope I will be able to also have one-on-one meetings with some of you in the UK for conversations of mutual interest during the first fortnight of June 2017. Please do let me know if you would like to schedule a meeting.

On the Indian front, I am glad to announce that the venue for the Indian Pharmacovigilance Day 2017 which is to be chaired by me has been identified as Hotel Lemon Tree Premier, HITEC City, Hyderabad. The conference to be held on Friday 28-July-2017 happens to be the first large scale gathering focused on pharmacovigilance to be organized in the city of Hyderabad in the recent past. I am delighted to state that well-recognized pharmacovigilance physicians like Dr Vivek Ahuja, Dr Arani Chatterjee, Dr P Usharani and Dr Ramesh Jagannathan have confirmed their availability to join the event as Invited Speakers. Please keep watching the conference website for the full agenda, names of the remaining speakers and information on registration/sponsorship which shall be updated shortly. I am sure that this conference will be as successful as its 2016 edition which I chaired in Mumbai last year, with your support as always.

Keen to reach you through our May 2017 edition from London,

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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