MEDICA to improve primary healthcare services in Sri Lanka

New start-up Bluevoke Holdings Ltd., via brand MEDICA (www.medica.lk), is trying to revolutionise the primary healthcare industry in Sri Lanka building 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. The whole process from patient registration to patient walking out with the medicines from a pharmacy is managed within MEDICA. Doctors with MEDICA will register all patients through the receptionist’s or nursing staff’s tablet application as well as channelling. Once the patient visits the doctor, the MEDICA doctor will make the diagnosis and type out 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 patient can search and send the prescription beforehand to collect drugs at the special counter. MEDICA-enabled laboratories can make appointments and send reports directly to the patient’s mobile application, where the patient can share them with the doctor prior to a second consultation. MEDICA-enabled pharmacies and laboratories will integrate current systems with MEDICA over the internet to scan and verify MEDICA QR code. Patients with MEDICA will have the MEDICA mobile application with all their prescription records and medical history, and manage access permissions to the same. The MEDICA application can manage multiple profiles where the family can use one single 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. A MEDICA-powered patient can see all the past prescriptions, diagnosis and reports in one smartphone app and share them with any MEDICA-enabled doctor or healthcare service.”

Digital disruptors are everywhere. The healthcare industry is also not immune to digital disruptions and has seen many changes and challenges to the way in which it operates. In today’s digital world where speed and integrated services are key to survival, it is time to optimise the current practice of issuing handwritten, barely legible prescriptions to a digital format where a pharmacy can issue medicines safely without hesitation. With the ICT initiative in Sri Lanka Government hospitals too are progressing into EMR solution for hospital management, including at the Out Patients 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 tune with ICT advancements, 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 a laptop computer, tablet or a smart phone. With MEDICA, doctors can eliminate duplicating the same information on prescriptions, medical reports/certificates or diagnosis cards. Studies show 40% of doctors’ time is taken for writing.

MEDICA is planned to be one of the biggest digital disruptors in the primary healthcare industry. MEDICA gives the power to visit multiple doctors seamlessly and share history. The cloud-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 error-prone 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.