Electronic Prescribing Management System for Rural Settings of Developing Countries : A Patient Centric System

Sammanfattning: During the last decade, electronic prescribing has been a point of focus in healthcare industry and is rapidly becoming a standard of practice. It has proven as an important element in improving the quality of patient care, mitigating or eliminating the phone calls back and forth from pharmacies to point of care/health centers. Many e-prescribing systems were developed and marketed but these usually were unsuccessful because of the lack of direct electronic connectivity to local pharmacies and the lack of up-to-date formulary information, clinical guidelines, health plans & services among other reasons. Despite their benefits, the adoption and usage of electronic prescribing systems has been low. In some of the developing countries like Uganda, the problem is even worst. Due to lack of essential resources and manpower, healthcare services have significantly impacted on the productivity and quality of patient care.In an effort to improve, promote and maintain the quality of health services in rural settings of developing countries like Uganda, a high level design for e-prescribing system has been proposed. Design specifications for Electronic Prescribing Management System (EPMS) along with functional prototype are built based on ICT4MPOWER project requirements and previous research and publications in this area.Initially research began with Drug and Stock Management System and EPMS emerged as one of its essential components. In order to strengthen and establish connection between ongoing electronic health record system and drug and stock management development, EPMS component came into lime light. Mare prescription management is not enough to serve patient centric needs. Hence, clinical decision support has been introduced into e- prescribing system to improve the quality of prescribing decisions. In order to develop a patient-centric e-prescribing system that is self-evolving and self sustaining, it is important to update the clinical decision-support system, formularies & guidelines on regular basis. In order to make it usable, it is required to formulate effective health plans and increase associations between pharmacies and other health organizational units. The principal benefit of introducing E-prescribing system into Electronic Health Record (EHR) System is to connect open ended systems to form a strong knowledge base for future.