THE New Zealand Ministry of Health has launched DataPharm, an online tool making it easier for New Zealanders to find information about publicly funded prescriptions.
The information is sourced from the Ministry of Health's Pharmaceutical Collection which receives data whenever a local pharmacy makes a claim to the Ministry to subsidise a prescription, when someone collects it.
While DataPharm will be useful for people who regularly analyse information about publicly funded prescriptions, such as policy analysts and researchers, anyone can access the tool at any time.
The limitations of the system are that only publicly funded medicines are recorded based on purchases in pharmacies over the four years 2012 to 2016, meaning it is unable to capture data from supermarket sales of products such as paracetamol.
It also excludes bulk and practitioner supply orders, NRT orders, haemophilia treatments, some treatments for hepatitis C and some historic information - details at minhealthnz.shinyapps.io.
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