MEDICA to revolutionise primary healthcare services utilising cloud eco-system

Bluevoke Holdings (Pvt.) Ltd., a new startup company along with its brand MEDICA, is in the works to revolutionise the primary healthcare industry in Sri Lanka, facilitating an eco-system of general practitioners/ dispensaries, pharmacies and laboratories though a cloud application.

MEDICA is a cloud-based patient management and prescription management platform for doctors. From patient registration to patient walking out with the medicine from a pharmacy, the process will be seamlessly managed within MEDICA.

Doctors with MEDICA will register all patients through a receptionist/nursing staff tablet app, and through channelling. Once the patient visits the doctor, the MEDICA doctor will make the diagnosis and type in the prescription to issue a printed prescription as well as send the digital prescription directly to the patient’s smartphone application.

The patient can then visit any pharmacy with the printed prescription as well as receive an enhanced experience at a Medica-enabled pharmacy, where the the patient can search and send the prescription in advance, to collect the prescribed drugs at the special counter.

Medica-enabled doctors will be equipped with a laptop/pc, with the MEDICA desktop application and a printer to print prescriptions, and the system will send a digital prescription to the patient’s smartphone app.

The patient can use the app to search for the closest pharmacy and the receiving Medicaenabled pharmacy can receive the prescription electronically and issue medicine quickly to the customer without any ambiguity in trying to decipher the doctor’s handwriting.

In turn, Medica-enabled laboratories can make appointments and send reports directly to the patient’s mobile app where the patient can share with the doctor, making a second consultation over the phone.

Medica-enabled pharmacies and laboratories integrate their current systems with MEDICA over the internet to scan and verify MEDICA QR codes. Patients with the MEDICA mobile app can view all the prescription records, medical history and manage permissions as to who can view the records. The MEDICA app can also conveniently manage multiple profiles, where a family can use one smartphone.

Bluevoke CEO Ravi Abeysekera said: “The concept for MEDICA was initiated, simply to provide a printed prescription to patients to reduce errors made by pharmacies. Today, we have evolved the application to build a network of doctors, pharmacies and laboratories to improve primary care in Sri Lanka. Medica-powered patients can see all the past prescriptions, diagnosis’ and reports in one smartphone app and share with any Medica-enabled doctor or healthcare service.”

Digital disruptors are everywhere. The healthcare industry is in a major phase of change due to digital disruption, and already there are many changes and challenges in the way we operate. In today’s digital world where speed and integrated services are key to survival, it is time to transform the current practice of issuing hand-written and barely understandable prescriptions, to issuing digital prescriptions, where pharmacies can issue medicines safely without hesitation.

With the Government of Sri Lanka’s ICT initiative, hospitals are progressing into EMR solutions for hospital management, including at the out-patient department (OPD). In hospitals such as Avissawella, Dompe and Karapitiya, the OPD has a system to register patients as well as provide printed prescriptions.

In line with the ICT advancements, the health industry too will need to adopt to computers to store patient data, and the best form of practice is to have a cloud solution for doctors to access patient information from anywhere through laptop computer, tab or a smartphone.

The roll-out of MEDICA doctors can eliminate duplicate writing of the same information on prescriptions, medical reports/certificates or diagnosis cards. Studies have shown that 40 percent of the doctor’s time is taken for writing.

MEDICA aims to be the biggest digital disruptor in the local primary healthcare sector. MEDICA gives patients the option to visit multiple doctors seamlessly and share the history. The could-based system will give access to any Medica-enabled doctors to view patient history shared by the patient.

MEDICA will be a single platform to manage patient records, investigation reports and secure prescriptions, eliminating the current practice of errorprone paper prescriptions.

MEDICA enabled patients, doctors, laboratories and pharmacies will have information transmitted among them controlled by the patient mobile application to build an eco-system for “Smart” medical care in Sri Lanka.