Drug information center in India: Overview, challenges, and future prospects

Medicine is a forever-evolving science and commands continuous research. Pharmacologists and pharmacists contribute various amounts of medicine-related information to physicians, while clinicians face challenges in evidence-based medicine practice due to several reasons such as overloaded number of drug approvals, as well as the enormous quantity of scientific research data in medical journals published every day, making it more complicated for doctors to stay updated with the current advancements. This in addition, results in the call for more sophisticated crisis-targeting skills in order to respond to the more complex clinical difficulties that brazen out practitioners today. The drug information center (DIC) service run by Department of Pharmacology is the bridge between doctors by providing accurate, unbiased, up-to-date drug information for better patient care. Novel initiatives, such as antibiotic stewardship programs, therapeutic drug monitoring, pharmacovigilance, and materiovigilance are being considered by Department of Pharmacology. On a similar note, DIC activities have a huge potential to fit in as an integral part of pharmacology curriculum. Undergraduate, postgraduate, and superspeciality pharmacology curricula are deficient in formal teaching of evidence-based medicine. Western countries have been running variety of courses on drug information like residencies, fellowships for the training of pharmacy, pharmacology postgraduate students for last four decades. This is the need of the hour for a country like India to inculcate such practices for promoting rational use of drugs. This review will highlight how pharmacology and pharmacy curricula can be upgraded so as to contribute for improvement of rational therapeutics in the era where alternative medicines are also considered by patients in disease management.