One year into e-prescriptions at mPharma
I have written in the past on why we started mPharma and why digitizing the prescription process is fundamental to preventing prescription drug abuse. While electronic prescription has been in the US for more than 2 decades, most doctors in Africa still rely on pen and paper to write prescriptions.
Our journey began in Zambia, a small country in Southern Africa. Not knowing exactly what is needed, where it is needed and when it is needed is a big challenge in closing the access to medicine gap. As i explained in a previous post, the mPharma journey began by trying to answer a simple question, “How do we make it easy for patients to know where their prescription drugs can be filled?” Our answer to that question was building an electronic prescription network that enabled doctors to know in real-time, the exact location and availability of any medicine of interest. Electronic prescriptions enabled doctors to do more than just tell their patients where their medication could be found. It helped them follow the patient journey from the point of prescription to the point of dispensation and consumption. Doctors received confirmation from mPharma when their patients picked up their medication. We built a communication layer on top of our e-prescription system that enabled any pharmacy on the network to chat with any doctor who sent a prescription to their pharmacy without having to send the patient back to the hospital if the pharmacist had any questions.
One year into this journey, I want to explain in a few graphs how we are doing. We have provided our electronic prescription tablet to 100+ doctors.
Today, about 10,000 patients have had their prescriptions sent through mPharma. Each prescription that is routed through mPharma enables us to create an in-depth disease profile of cities, demographics and medication supply and demand. We can also do all of this in real-time.
Today, more than 26,000 drugs have been prescribed through our network. We know which doctor prescribed what, if the drug was dispensed and by who. We know if the drug was dispensed fully or partially, when the patient’s refill is due and if they picked up their refill. We know if there where any substitutions and many more.
We want to grow the number of prescribers on mPharma to about 600 by the end of the year. Each doctor we onboard and work with gives us further insights into how we can make our prescription application better. We need to do a better job in understanding how to continue to create enormous value for doctors through e-prescription. We need to improve the accuracy of stock data on our pharmacy network so doctors don’t inaccurately prescribe a drug that has run out. Prescriptions are just one component of a broader workflow for doctors and hospitals, thus, we need to do better in understanding how our application fits into the overall workflow of the hospitals and doctors we work with.
Eventually, we have to enable EMR software providers who sell their solutions to hospitals in Africa to integrate their systems into our pharmacy network. This way we will become more of a Surescripts than a Drfirst. This will allow us to become ubiquitous and a fundamental infrastructure for a move towards electronic prescription in Africa.
