Day 9/10 – ranitidine and famotidine

I spent my day investigating two drugs. We were contacted by a CBC reporter asking about shortages of Ranitidine and Famotidine, both drugs used for reflux (why these drugs were chosen by the CBC… that’s…

Day 5 – potpourri

Today I went in a mishmash of directions. Let me walk you through it. An R package for shortages I began the day a bit grumpy so decided to do some yak shaving, and as…

R package for drug shortages

2020 May Update: This package is now called rdrugshortages. Introducing drugshortagesr! An awful name for somewhat useful chunk of code to make it easier to access shortagescanada.ca shortage data. The package is currently in development,…

Day 4 – one particular drug

I didn’t mention it in my previous post, but I actually spent a long while yesterday attempting to match medicines from the proposed Canadian Essential Medicines List (EML) to the list of shortages. Initially I…

Day 3 – essential medicines

Well, day 3 has spilled over into night 3 and into day 4’s morning. It began with the question of how to assess the impact that drug shortages have on the health care system. Now,…

Day 2 – the flow of shortages

Today I focused on two things: a) starting fresh with a database export via the web API, and b) looking more closely at some basic displays that characterize shortages over time. To do all of…

Day 1 – new data, old charts

I spent the bulk of the morning setting up my development environment and refreshing myself on R and my analysis code from our paper. I then grabbed a recent export of the drug shortages database…

Revisiting Canadian Drug Shortages

I am a medical student in Canada and I am spending the next two weeks revisiting our previous work looking at the state of prescription drug shortages in Canada. I’ve already written a few introductory…

Canadian Drug Shortages, redux

Okay, so my reading elective was rejected, what replaced it? Here’s the pitch: In 2018 I coauthored a paper on the drug shortages in Canada. At the time, we primarily relied on a database of…