The first phase of the digitalization project of the National Medicines Regulatory Authority was launched at an event held at the NMRA in the presence of the Minister of Health Hon. Rajitha Senaratne. The project was initiated in partnership with Information and Communication Technology Agency (ICTA) of Sri Lanka where the tech giant Epic Technology Group was selected as the service provider. The new system – a pioneering transformational e-government solution, is expected to enable the NMRA’s divisions to bring down processing time significantly.

The initiative came with the review of the current system as being inefficient by the NMRA team headed by the Chairman of NMRA Prof. Asita de Silva and CEO/DG Dr. Kamal Jayasinghe with Shriyananda Rathnayake, Programme Manager of ICTA, supporting closely. The new System is based on Epic Technology Group’s DoxPro Enterprise Content Management Platform, which aims to lower the cost of operations and save thousands of labour hours spent annually on regulatory process, and thereby enable the NMRA to achieve regulatory excellence through its end to end Information-as-a-service model.

Commenting on the launch of Phase 01, Dr. Nayan Dehigama, Executive Chairman of Epic Technology Group stated that the group was honoured to have been awarded the project and for the opportunity to work alongside the NMRA and ICTA. “As a local leader in technology, it is our responsibility to contribute to enhancing and upgrading such systems that will benefit the general public”.

The Chairman of NMRA describing the current manual systems as “archaic and inefficient” believes that the Medicines Regulator expects Epic’s DoxPro “end to end Information-as-a-service” model would “exponentially lower the cost of operations, save thousands of labour hours annually spent on regulatory process and help the NMRA achieve regulatory excellence”.