A Mobile and web application to track availability of essential medicines in pharmacies

Abstract

Essential medicines are an imperative component in a country's health system and the need to ensure the availability of this class of drugs becomes apparent due to increased demand, given that this class of drug commodities is prone to stock-outs and unavailability. There are myriad challenges that come into play when there is limited or inaccurate information to guide the procurement of essential drugs and these include but are not limited to stock-outs and expiration of drugs. This is often due to over-stocking or poor procurement decisions based on inaccurate data related to dispensation patterns hence providing poor heuristics for accurate decision making. It has been estimated that public facilities often experience stock outs of essential drugs about 46 days per year even though the health expenditure on medicines is about 66%. This research proposes a mobile and web solution to address the challenge of gathering sufficient data and analysis of information regarding dispensation and loss patterns of essential medicines in pharmacies. This will be done by providing a mechanism to capture the dispensation information via mobile devices and visualizing available information such as stock data using graphs. The mobile application will utilize the Angular JavaScript framework and the Angular NVD3 graphing library to allow pharmacy practitioners to view stock and report data in the form of useful visualizations and summaries for decision-making on the fly. The application also provides an opportunity to share dispensation pattern and loss data with KEMSA by providing a share data feature. The information sharing will allow KEMSA to enhance their planning activities with regards to providing essential medicines in pharmaceutical outlets by collecting relevant information related to losses experienced in pharmacies as well as the pattern of dispensation of various commodities. The outcomes of this research are beneficial to any public service bodies mandated with the task of availing essential medicines, so that they can consider ways to collaborate closely with pharmaceutical retailers to be able to achieve the goal of availing critical medicines for all and address the concern of unavailability of this class of drugs.