Electronic Medication Prescribing Support System for Diagnosing Tropical Diseases

Tropical diseases are diseases that are unique to tropical and subtropical regions affecting nearly everyone in the “bottom billion” of the world’s poorest people. They have a terrible impact on health involving child growth and development, harm pregnant women, cause disability and disfigurement and often cause long-term debilitating illnesses. The conventional mode of medical prescription by doctors is usually handwritten and hand-delivered by patient to the dispensing pharmacist. This method has been found to be prone to prescription errors and it is an inefficient means to store and access a patients’ prescription record for future decisions on patient health. Majority of the flaws inherent in the conventional approach arises from fairly illegible handwriting of the physician, misinterpretation of a prescription by the pharmacist, lack of knowledge of a patient’s health record, and also the queue experienced by the patient when it comes to collecting drugs. This paper presents the development of an e-prescription system for diagnosing tropical diseases.Results after testing the developed system by medical experts indicated that the e-prescription systems is more efficient and less susceptible to common errors associated with the conventional handwritten medical prescription and can also go a long way to help to improve patients health outcome in the health industry especially in the tropics.