Prescription Processing System for A Large Scale Pharmaceutical Business

Abstract

Prescription processing in a pharmaceutical business involves a set of stages that are crucial to a consumer's health. These stages span from reading prescriptions, checking drug availability based on required quantities, collecting drugs from store, verifying the collected drugs against the prescription before issuing them to the customer, billings and issuing. In large scale pharmacies multiple prescriptions are processed simultaneously which leads to a single employee processing several prescriptions together or several employees being involved with different stages of a single prescription. This could result in human errors due to manual handling, leading to high time consumption, issuance of wrong drugs, dosages and incorrect instructions that can be fatal in certain situations. An application that enables modeling the prescription life cycle to isolate priorities at each life cycle stage, facilitates minimization and elimination of these errors. The tools and technologies today enable separation and loose coupling of UI, Business logic and Data layer, to emphasize clear focus on responsibilities of each layer there by increasing the viability of extending, enriching and changing applications as time and requirements demand. Microservices that enable building small, light weight, independent services and Business Process Modeling which enables modeling work flow logic, together enable creating Business Process Management applications. The project is an implementation of a 'Prescription processing system for a large scale pharmaceutical business', built using Microservices and Business process management technologies to address the issues involved with manual handling in the pharmaceutical businesses domain. The solution consists of a distributed system, accessible online, by pharmaceutical staff and consumers which also facilitates pharmacy-consumer interaction. The solution implementation is based on the incremental development methodology, where design and implementation details were gradually expanded as the project evolved, which ultimately lead to a significant separation of UI, Business services/processes and Data layers, creating opportunity for easy extension and incorporation of features.