Online Medicine Delivery Portal

Abstract

The current retail pharmacy exhibits critical inefficiencies and drawbacks when it comes to selling or delivering medicine items to customers. In a typical scenario of purchasing items over a pharmacy counter, customer has to encounter time wastage, inconvenience due to waiting in queues, health issues due to encountering many contact points and unsecure payment methods posing high risk of getting infected by pandemic diseases such as COVID-19. Though a handful of E Pharmacy systems exist in the industry, they only offer sell and deliver medicine items their physical pharmacy store. Due to the high cost in affording and implementing an online pharmacy system, small to medium scale pharmacies who are willing to deliver online and continue their business during the pandemic, are unable to do so. By the time the thesis is composed, the country is in the situation where physically visiting any outside premises causes a potential health threat. Even during such situation, authorities and officials have failed to implement a proper delivery mechanism of medicine to general public due to poor communication mechanism and mismanagements in delivery mechanism. The project Online Medicine Delivery Portal can be identified as an E Pharmacy solution which is implemented with the intention of addressing inefficiencies in the common retail Pharmacy system in Sri Lanka and problems highlighted above. Unlike a conventional single store E Pharmacy application, the OMDP acts as a complete solution which offers customers with flexibility to compare item prices across multiple Virtual Pharmacies registered in the OMDP and upload prescription to multiple pharmacies and receive the best price offering with advanced order tracking functionality. The project OMDP also enables customers and pharmacy personnel to transact safely with contact less and secure payment methods. The project OMDP will be initially delivered to “The Nawinna Pharmacy Pvt Ltd Kurunegala” and “The Pharmacy and Grocery Pvt Ltd Kurunegala” who are also the clients of the project. Both the above pharmacies are based in Kurunegala district. Both of the clients currently do not possess any form E Pharmacy application. Both clients are recognized as leading retail pharmacy companies in the market.