As medicine shortage is an increasing problem across the EU and can put patients at critical health risk, the CISMED medicine shortage detection system aims to identify where medicine shortages occur and how to prevent them. For this, the system will provide an overview of the medication availability in three countries (Portugal, France, and Italy), and will detect, predict and prevent medicine shortages. This data can then be used by the Competent Authorities to put the necessary measures in place in order to prevent future medicine shortages or to mitigate existing ones.
The system is based on the SNOMED CT protocols, which allows better interoperability and transferability of gathered data as well as presenting a real picture of patients’ accessibility to medicines in a medicine shortage scenario. It will give Community Pharmacies the necessary tools to report short supplies automatically and in real time, and uses a variety of parameters, such as medicine shortage definition or medicinal product identification. The twinning solution will allow the adopter countries to learn how to implement or improve a medicines shortages detection system with information collected and treated in a similar way in all countries (normalization), that can be used to predict medicine shortages at regional and (inter-)national and levels.