Pharmacist learnt from dad’s medical hardship
WHEN Johannes Mangane watched his dad, Joseph, spend R40 to travel 30km and queue for hours at his local clinic just to pick up his hypertension medication, something stirred in him.
Now, years later, Mangane, a pharmacist in Mpumalanga, has developed an app that will change the lives of hundreds of thousands of South Africans in a similar situation to his father.
PillDrop, which will be available on all types of smartphones, aims to link patients with motorists and healthcare facilities.
Mangane is one of six finalists in the international Sandoz Healthcare Access Challenge competition, and could win about R300 000.
Explaining how the app would work, Mangane said: “The patient would log a call on the app to say they want a refill of their prescription from Clinic A, and the app will look for registered drivers to see who is close to that clinic and alert them to the request. Once that driver accepts the pick-up, the app sends a message to the facility to tell them that a certain person would pick up the script on behalf of the patient. Once the script has been collected, a message is sent to the patient to say it’s been collected and gives an estimated time of when it might be delivered.”
The drivers would be paid for the delivery, but this would likely be significantly less than the taxi fares most people pay, and would save hours of queueing.
To ensure safety, only once the patient has received the medicine will the log be closed on the clinic’s side. If the medicines are not delivered, it would be easy to tell where they went missing and who was responsible. Mangane is also looking at the option of electronic “smart boxes” that can only be opened using a code sent to the patient — but this would be costly.
Although PillDrop is still in the concept stage, Mangane said he wanted a pilot project up and running with the 135 clinics in Ehlanzeni, Mpumalanga. But the biggest markets, if all goes according to plan, are in countries such as India, where access to medicines is a massive challenge. GAME-CHANGER: Johannes Mangane is in line for an award
Mangane will be taken to London in March for the competition finals.
“In an ideal world, I think, it must be running on a pilot basis to check the nitty-gritties by the end of the year,” he said.
Carel Meintjes, commercial excellence head at Sandoz in South Africa, said PillDrop could be a game-changer. “Two billion people worldwide cannot access the medicines they need. In South Africa, a lack of infrastructure, especially in remote areas, is a huge challenge we are well aware of.
“PillDrop uses mobile technology to address key weaknesses in local healthcare access. If he wins this challenge, his proposed solution can, without doubt, be applied locally and eventually globally to immense benefit.”