Healthcare and Hospital Management

Currently in developing countries, distribution of pharmacy drugs in a controlled way can be a challenging task due to lack of medical doctors and/or adequate technology especially in rural areas. For the patients in rural areas, getting prescriptions or getting adequate drugs for their illness can be diffi cult due to aforementioned reason, so expected patient outcome in the regions

remains low. Also the patients in rural areas may try substitute medicine for their illness due to the unavailability of pharmacy drugs, so early detection of possible epidemic can be diffi cult as such treatments do not leave any related data to collect. Even if prescriptions for the patients in rural area are available, access to nearby city pharmacies is still diffi cult due to lack of adequate transportation. In an attempt to resolve such issues, we propose an approach that utilizes information technology available in rural areas of developing countries such as 2G/2.5G SMS, that is available in most of developing countries, to deliver prescription/medication to the patients. Our SMS approach includes various associated technologies such as mobile payments, method of delivery, tracing prescription status, and storing SMS based prescription/medication related conversation for a patient to a cloud

based electronic health record system after conversion to HL7 clinical document architecture (CDA) for future reference. In our approach, doctors can prescribe medication for their patients using SMS technology to any of the pharmacies listed in the pharmacy database. The pharmacy who

received prescription(s) may fulfi ll the prescription and send a text message to the patient notifying that medication is ready to be delivered. As soon as the patient chooses a delivery method, the prescribed drugs are delivered to the patient. After the delivery, a text message is sent back to the doctor notifying that the prescription is fulfi lled.