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Medicine Price Registry

Retail medicine prices are regulated in South Africa through the Single Exit Price Mechanism. These prices are published on a regular basis at http://www.mpr.gov.za. The information is only available in a large and unwieldy excel spreadsheet making it inaccessible to casual users.

This projects builds an API and basic user interface to query this database. You can find a running instance at http://mpr.code4sa.org.

A typical use-case would be for a consumer to look for alternative products for a particular medicine, often generic medicines can be much cheaper than the branded product. Another use-case allows consumers to ensure that they are not being overcharged for their medicines. This database publishes the maximum price at which a medicine can be sold. A pharmacy cannot legally increase the price of a particular medicine above the price listed here.

Updating the database

  1. Download the latest public domain NAPPI file from https://www.medikredit.co.za/products-and-services/nappi/nappi-public-domain-file/

    wget https://www.medikredit.co.za/wp-content/mk-data-files/nappi-pub/PUBDOM.zip -P data/nappi_codes
unzip data/nappi_codes/PUBDOM.zip -d data/nappi_codes/

  2. Download the latest SEP file

a. visit https://www.health.gov.za/nhi-pee/

b. click on Databases

c. Download the Database Of Medicine Prices file with the latest date

d. move it to the data directory

  1. Run the import

     docker-compose run --rm web python manage.py loadsepdata data/LatestSEPDatabase....xlsx

  2. Check that the updates look sensible.

  3. Commit the changes to mpr.db in git

  4. Deploy the changes.

API

In addition to providing this simple web interface, we make available a rudimentary API that you can use to access the most up-to-date prices to be used in third party applications.

Version 2

Basic search e.g. https://mpr.code4sa.org/api/v2/search-lite?q=lamictin

A more comprehensive search that makes available additional fields https://mpr.code4sa.org/api/v2/search?q=lamictin

Accessing product details https://mpr.code4sa.org/api/v2/detail?nappi=703312001

Finding generic products (based in active ingredients) https://mpr.code4sa.org/api/v2/related?nappi=703312001

Downloading a dump of the entire database https://mpr.code4sa.org/api/v2/dump

Get the last updated date https://mpr.code4sa.org/api/v2/last-updated

Version 1

This version of the API used database IDs to lookup medicines. The result was that urls that included the IDs didn't resolve to the same medicines when the database updated.

Basic search e.g. https://mpr.code4sa.org/api/search-lite?q=lamictin

A more comprehensive search that makes available additional fields https://mpr.code4sa.org/api/search?q=lamictin

Accessing product details https://mpr.code4sa.org/api/detail?product=3841

Finding generic products (based in active ingredients) https://mpr.code4sa.org/api/related?product=3841

Downloading a dump of the entire database https://mpr.code4sa.org/api/dump

Contributing

To work on this project locally, run

docker-compose up

nodejs and yuglify are apparently needed, but somehow it still works locally?!

On Linux, you probably want to set the environment variables USER_ID=$(id -u) and GROUP_ID=$(id -g) where you run docker-compose so that the container shares your UID and GID. This is important for the container to have permission to modify files owned by your host user (e.g. for python-black) and your host user to modify files created by the container (e.g. migrations).

Deployment

This app is hosted on dokku or Heroku.

To deploy to an existing dokku (or heroku) server:

  1. git remote add dokku dokku@dokku.code4sa.org:mpr
  2. git push dokku

To deploy to a new heroku instance:

  1. heroku login
  2. heroku apps:create APP-NAME
  3. heroku config:set DJANGO_DEBUG=false DJANGO_SECRET_KEY=some-secret-key
  4. git push heroku

TODO

  • Allow for searching of related products
  • Create a script that downloads the latest database instead of shipping a sqlite db with the repo
  • It might be useful to compare prices over time
  • Seems like there are some spelling errors in the database - e.g. paracetamol and paracetemol. Might need to clean the database through some sort of fuzzy match and possibly report those errors back to mpr

Contributors

  • Adi Eyal - @soapsudtycoon
  • Shaun O'Connell - @ndorfin