University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
Malar J. 2010 Jul 22;9:214. doi: 10.1186/1475-2875-9-214.
A large fraction of anti-malaria medicines (and indeed many other medicines classes) used in developing countries are inadequately identified. Framing this problem as one of misidentification rather than the more common framing of criminal misrepresentation leads to new solutions sets not currently being considered.
That reframing led to consideration and analysis of 4 new problems that informed design of a digital platform technology for delivering a distributed medicine characterization system: 1) problematic interests associated with a focus on preventing counterfeiting, 2) the complexity of the many ways that medicines can deviate from expected identities, 3) the challenge of choosing amongst a diversity of attribute characterization technologies, and 4) the need for a flexible and distributed data aggregation mechanism.
Analysis of those new problems confirmed an initial insight that a previously described digital technology for tracking malaria tests results in infrastructure limited regions could be adapted for characterizing pill attributes. Feasibility is illustrated by describing how the platform design can be implemented using open-source software and commodity computational and communication technology readily available and supportable in developing countries.
A system of this type would allow users to answer several questions. Is this medicine what it is supposed to be? Can it be used to treat locally encountered malaria? What has been the experience of others who have used pills having the same identity? Ubiquitous access to global digital telecommunication infrastructure allows the system to generate data streams from these distributed medicine characterization transactions that can be used to map global patterns of use of specifically identified medicines. This can provide feedback necessary to guide efforts to reduce the burden of malaria.
发展中国家使用的大量抗疟药物（实际上还有许多其他药物类别）都没有得到充分识别。将这个问题视为识别不当，而不是更常见的犯罪欺诈行为，会产生目前尚未考虑的新解决方案。
这种重新定义促使我们考虑和分析了 4 个新问题，这些问题为设计一个用于提供分布式药物特征描述系统的数字平台技术提供了信息：1）与专注于防止假冒相关的利益问题，2）药物偏离预期身份的多种方式的复杂性，3）在多样性属性特征描述技术中做出选择的挑战，4）对灵活分布式数据聚合机制的需求。
对这些新问题的分析证实了一个初步的见解，即在基础设施有限的地区用于跟踪疟疾测试结果的先前描述的数字技术可以适应于描述药丸属性。通过描述如何使用现成的、在发展中国家可获得和支持的开源软件和商品计算及通信技术来实施平台设计，说明了其可行性。
这种类型的系统将允许用户回答几个问题。这种药物是否符合其应有的标准？它可以用于治疗当地遇到的疟疾吗？其他人使用具有相同身份的药丸有何经验？全球数字电信基础设施的普遍使用使系统能够从这些分布式药物特征描述交易中生成数据流，这些数据流可用于绘制特定识别药物的全球使用模式。这可以提供必要的反馈，以指导减少疟疾负担的努力。
