Pharmaceutical Sales Trends: Comprehensive Drug Demand Analysis

November 6, 20246 min read

Healthcare

Pharmacy photo from Freepik

Introduction

In a data-driven exploration of pharmaceutical sales, I used Power BI to analyze demand fluctuations for various drug classes in a pharmacy in Niš, Serbia. This project, spanning six years (2014–2019), provided insights into drug consumption patterns, seasonal demands, and the impact of weekly trends. Here's a deep dive into the methods, insights, and visual storytelling that brought this data to life.

Project Overview

The goal of this analysis was to uncover patterns in the sales of pharmaceuticals, categorized under the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) classification system. This system groups drugs based on their therapeutic use, providing clarity on the types of medications analyzed and the overall trends across six years.

Data Source: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/milanzdravkovic/pharma-sales-data/data

License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Original Authors: Zdravković, M., Đorđević, J., Catić-Đorđević, A., Pavlović, S., Ivković, M. Case study: univariate time series analysis and forecasting of pharmaceutical products' sales data at small scale. In: Zdravković, M., Konjović, Z., Trajanović, M. (Eds.) ICIST 2020 Proceedings, pp.1–4, 2020

Understanding the Data

The dataset comprised:

Hourly Sales Data: Sales volumes measured in grams, captured hourly, across drug categories.
ATC Drug Class Info: Supplementary data on each drug category's purpose, description, and cumulative sales volumes in grams.