Home / News / Oct / 2016 / Imagine getting prescriptions delivered to your bedside

Imagine getting prescriptions delivered to your bedside

Very soon, seriously ill Jamaicans will be able to stay in bed and use their smartphones to get home delivery of their medication from the pharmacy.

It will even get better when the University Hospital of the West Indies (UHWI) gets connected to the electronic hub, and individuals who leave the hospital, but still need medical attention, can stay at home and get the same attention without having to move a leg.

That is the vision of the pharmaceutical sector, which was explored at a briefing hosted by the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce (JCC) Pharmaceutical Committee for members, held at the Knutsford Court, New Kingston, last week.

It is also the vision of the chairman of the pharmacy council and the chamber’s Pharmaceutical Committee, Dr Norman Dunn, CEO and chairman of Cari-Med Limited and Kirk Distributors Limited, Glen Christian and Douglas Halsall, CEO of Jamaica’s Advanced Integrated System (AIS), one of the leading providers of health solutions in the Caribbean.

With the UHWI likely to be fully digitalised by year end, as it converts to an electronic hospital management system to overhaul its record-keeping and management functions, Halsall believes it will signal a great leap into the future.

Halsall says that the system will provide end-to-end computerisation of the hospital — from registration to doctors’ desk, bed management, and lab requests to pharmacy. But, he says AIS does not intend to stop there, as the company is pursuing a view to extend the digitised system into the private sector by introducing a digitised health care system.

He believes that AIS, having assisted pharmacists in overcoming their major challenge of introducing a seamless, digital system of using health cards to process the users’ claims from their health insurance providers, is now ready to expand its network to completely digitise Jamaica’s health care system at the public and private levels.

Dr Dunn sees the possibility as well, recognising AIS technological competence which has allowed the company to make an outstanding impact on modernising the local pharmaceutical sector.

He noted that one of the main challenges private pharmacists faced in the past was accessing payments from the insurance providers, as the old manual process often led to claims reaching the insurer after the consumer had already used up all the benefits.

“AIS brought greater efficiency to the system and all those problems were eliminated. Now, once you process the claim, payment is assured,” Dunn told the briefing.

Halsall, who formerly headed US firm NCR’s operations in Jamaica, started AIS in 1987 as an option to taking up a transfer to another NCR location in Dayton, Ohio.

He pointed out that AIS started with Blue Cross, and has since extended its partnership across the National Health Fund (NHF), Sagicor, Guardian Life, and other clients, and its performance is viewed “very favourably” by experts in the United States.

“Today we process 130,000 to 150,000 claims per day from 1.2 million card holders, and we are in over 100 pharmacies in Jamaica and The Bahamas,” he said, noting that the company is moving next to explore possibilities in Trinidad and Tobago.

He said that AIS also boasts its own health cloud, and there is protection to ensure that if one of its systems goes down others will not experience any downtime.

Halsall believes that, with AIS moving further into the medical practice field, it will now be able to handle medical e-prescribing by linking the use of smartphones using the banking services to pay medical prescribed bills via a smartphone.

This would remove the need for sick people finding their way to the nearest pharmacy, or the ones that have the prescription in stock, through the public transportation maze.

Halsall says with the AIS system, all public pharmacies can so access e-prescribing. Private pharmacies using the system can use the system to access prescriptions and their customers could utilise mobile banking to pay for the prescriptions. However, that requires the approval of the Ministry of Health.

Electronic prescribing is the computer-based electronic generation, transmission and filling of a medical prescription, taking the place of paper and faxed prescriptions.

E-prescribing allows a physician, pharmacist, nurse practitioner, or physician’s assistant to electronically transmit a new prescription or renewal authorisation to a community or mail-order pharmacy. It outlines the ability to send error-free and understandable prescriptions electronically from the health care provider to the pharmacy. E-prescribing is meant to reduce the risks associated with traditional prescription script writing.

It is also one of the major reasons for the push for electronic medical records. By sharing medical prescription information, e-prescribing seeks to connect the patient’s team of health care providers to facilitate knowledgeable decision-making.

However, Dr Dunn concedes that before e-prescribing can become available publicly, it will have to meet the approval of the pharmacy council, of which he is chairman.

“We would need to protect the privacy of the patients. The pharmacy council would have to protect the patient’s personal information and data, at all costs,” he said, something Halsall noted his AIS would have no probem handling.

-Jamaica Observer