The objective of prescribing medicines is to improve patient health. However, many times the expected results of medications are not achieved, which causes morbidity and mortality associated to medication use. These failures of prescription drug use have been published in numerous scientific studies and negatively affect patient health as well as cause economic damages (to patients in particular and society in general). But studies show that the majority of these failures are avoidable.
Although expenses in healthcare to treat patients are high, the prevalence of morbi-mortality associated to drug prescription is high, mostly due to the fact that patients fail to follow doctor’s instructions on prescription and/or doctors duplicating therapeutics, which includes unforeseen drug interactions that can cause harm to patients.
The prevention or correction of the incorrect use of prescribed drugs requires a regular evaluation by health professionals and the measurement of periodic indicators that allow the monitoring the effectiveness and safety of prescribed medication use by patients.
To this avail, Farmácia Saude, working closely with chemists, medical doctors and patients since 1960 in Portugal, with a team of 14 experts has created a new department in the company, focused on ICT, dedicated to develop an eHealth platform for pharmacies to assess patient clinical progress due to prescribed medication and provide services to patients – DrBox.
In this Phase 1 we aimed to establish the technical Feasibility of the DrBox version (with several end-user interviews and client feedback) and to define the beachhead markets for the commercial launch of the service.
