Background In response to the financial crisis and under the EU/IMF Programme of Financial Support, Ireland committed to make savings on pharmaceutical expenditure, including through a system of generic substitution (GS) and reference pricing (RP) [1]. This intervention involved GS based on fifth level ATC code (active substance), which was followed by RP 3-5 months later. The aim of this analy...

What?s in a name? A brand-name drug and its generic counterpart are chemically the same. They may have different names, colors, and shapes, but the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires generic drugs to share several similarities as the brand-name counterparts (more on this later). And, while there are some differences, generics don?t really change the effectiveness of the d...

C++ is a multi-paradigm language. The two main paradigms in C++ are object-oriented programming and generic programming. Many real-world C++ software projects use these two paradigms side by side. This creates considerable tension due to the fact that object-oriented programming is largely based on the judicious choice of types and hierarchies, while generic programming tends to cause an abunda...

This study evaluated knowledge and use of generic drugs in a population-based sample of adults from a southern Brazilian city. The outcomes were: the proportion of generics in total medicines used; theoretical and practical knowledge about generics; and strategies used to buy medicines on medical prescriptions. The recall period for drug utilization was 15 days. The proportion of generics in to...

Time and again the importance of generic prescribing has been emphasized, primarily to reduce the cost of drugs (Mukherjee, 2013). There are two concepts to be understood here, one is generic vs. patented drugs and the other is a drug’s “brand name” vs. “non-proprietary name” or “generic name.” Although, our article primarily describes the Indian scenario, it can be extrapolated to other countr...