A pharmacy stock control management system to effectively monitor and manage patients on ART

This paper describes an open-source software system developed to dispense antiretroviral (ARV) drugs to HIV+ patients in South Africa. There are numerous constraints to the scaling up of antiretroviral treatment (ART) in resourcepoor settings; one being the difficulty in monitoring and capturing of relevant patient data. South Africa has a severe lack of qualified medical staff, from doctors and pharmacists to nursing sisters, and it is imperative that the existing scarce resources are utilized effectively. Based on an assessment of the local context, the system is comprised of two applications which reside at geographically separate locations. The first is housed at a central supply pharmacy where ARV drugs are packaged by a pharmacist for individual patients. The second application is housed at a service point or ARV site, where patients collect their medication from a nurse. Using HCI theory, it is designed to be user friendly and easy to learn for the nurses working at this health care facility. Features such as stock control and patient history (of timeous medication collection) make it easy for the pharmacist to assess each site receiving drugs from the central store. In a resource constrained environment, it is important to assess software and maintenance costs to ensure long term sustainability of a project. By using open source software for development, additional costs of licensing are drastically reduced. The system described is developed in Java and connects to a PostgreSQL database management system. A client-server model is used to extend the outreach of trained pharmacists who can now dispense ARV drugs to a number of patients located in separate remote areas. The system focuses on patient monitoring and measurements of drug adherence through feedback between the applications. A prototype system was suc