Design and Implementation of a Clinical Pharmacy Management and Electronic Prescription System

A pharmacy is viewed as a physical store contained either in a hospital or as a small venture primarily saddled with the responsibility of dispensing medication to various individuals. While various individuals choose voluntarily to bypass the need for professional medical advice in the area of drug prescription by engaging in self-medication, either as a result of lack of funds or ignorance of what should be done, quality pharmaceutical services could mean the difference between life and death. Problems such as handwriting misinterpretation, cost incurred from frequent calls from pharmacists to physicians, data inconsistency and long waiting lines exist in traditional, manual pharmacy management methods. The goal of this paper therefore is to review the traditional approach to pharmacy management and prescription handling with the view of developing an electronic version. The solution was implemented using the Java programming language due to its platform independence and object-oriented nature. The proposed system addresses the aforementioned problems.