A comprehensive drug identification database TICTAC for Healthcare is the UK’s leading drug identification database, containing detailed photographs and related information on thousands of different medicines — including ethical, generic, over the counter, prescription only, vetinary products, vitamins and food supplements, herbal remedies, illicit drugs, parallel import and products that resemble medicines, such as confectionery.

• Identify a product/substance
• Find alternative sources of medicines
• Produce lists of products by active ingredient
• Generate lists with pictures of products
• Find out who makes a particular product

• Medical information pharmacists
• Community pharmacists
• Pharmacists
• Doctors
• Poisions information service
• Pharmaceutical companies
• Nursing staff
• Hospital clinicians
• Clinical and pharmacy support services

Pharmacists within the community may use TICTAC to:

• Enable them to identify an unknown tablet or capsule.
• Help them to identify who makes and manufactures a particular drug.
• Investigate a suspected dispensing error — for example, an identification of mixed batches of generic names.
• Ensure that loose tablets and capsules in drug trays are the correct medicines.

Pharmacists working within a hospital may use TICTAC to:

• Help them find an alternative source of product.
• Produce a list of products by active ingredient.
• Enable them to identify an unknown tablet or capsule.

Doctors may use TICTAC to:

• Identify a tablet or capsule that has been taken as a suspected overdose.
• Enable them to identify a tablet or capsule quickly in order to carry out the correct treatment — and to save money that would otherwise be spent on identifying the product by another source.

Pharmaceutical companies – who are continually making and marketing new products – may use TICTAC to:

• Check the uniqueness of proposed new markings and product designs.
• Act as a market intelligence tool — for example, to find out who sells whose products?
• Enable them to identify an unknown tablet or capsule.
• Assist in markings and design for products used in clinical trials.

• An image of each drug.
• Descriptive data.
• The active ingredient.
• The manufacturer’s name, address, contact numbers, logos and licence codes.
• An automatic web link to the Summary of Product Characteristics (SPCs) contained in the electronic Medicines Compendium (eMC), as shown below…

When TICTAC identifies your unknown product, click the SPC button at the bottom right of the results screen for your direct link to the Summary of Product Characteristics. (If no SPC button is shown, it means that the product identified by TICTAC is not contained in the eMC).

There are currently over 3,316 SPCs contained in the eMC, and 3,000 products in TICTAC that have an SPC link.

• Free access to the most authoritative and up-to-date UK medicines information website, the eMC, which contains SPCs and Patient Information Leaflets (PILs).
• Monographs.
• Syva® Emit® Urine Drug Assays Cross-reactivity Data.
• Glossary.
• Summary of drug street prices supplied by the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS).
• Information on American drugs.

“TICTAC helps our members provide a service to the public for the identification of tablets and capsules. It is an efficient tool to deal with the myriad of identification enquiries that arise in a busy community pharmacy. TICTAC is more that just an identification system. It provides practical information on any areas of interest.”

Michelle Styles, National Pharmaceutical Association

“In Accident & Emergency Departments we are constantly faced with accidental and deliberate drug overdosages…TICTAC is often an essential resource at such times as its database of over 65,000 products is fully searchable…The search will not only enable identification of the product…but it will return photographs which give added reassurance to nursing and medical stuff and enable correct treatment to be instituted.”

Professor John A Henry, Imperial College School of Medicine, St Mary’s Hospital, London.

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Published by TICTAC Communications Ltd