Field

The present invention relates specifically to simplify the drug ordering process using any mobile phone application (App).

Background

In general, healthcare providers and medical pharmacies would order drugs from drug distributor to meet their drugs demand. These healthcare providers and medical pharmacies often would have to depend on sales representatives or directories to obtain the latest price from the distributor which consist of the drugs that is being offered. The way that the healthcare providers and medical pharmacies would order a drug is by calling the representative or send their orders to the distributor in their usual mode of ordering.

In some cases, for different type of drugs, the healthcare providers and medical pharmacies would need to contact different distributors to order. These causes the healthcare providers and medical pharmacies to obtain many price lists from different distributors and cause them the need to browse through that many price list and send their order individually. This has incurred more time to make an order beside the need to keep the price list in the shelf.

Summary

The purpose of the present invention is to provide a new way of ordering drugs. Healthcare providers and medical pharmacies can get the advantages from the features that the App has to offer by mainly but not limited to reducing the time to get an order done.

The App provides drugs that available for orders from various distributors. GP can browse and search for the drugs that they want within the App. The App also provide detail informations that GP would normally need such as the price, unit of measurement, categories and contents. The App even has the latest date of the price stated, this would give the GP an ease of mind regarding the price.

Once the healthcare providers and medical pharmacies found the drugs that they want they can input the quantity and remarks of that particular drug and add the drug to the cart. The cart would have all the drugs that will be ordered. They can remove the drug from the cart if they found it no longer needed. Once they confirm the drugs they can proceed to place order and the drugs will be send to the server at the backend for processing.

Once the orders are received at the backend, the backend will send the orders to the drug distributors. Brief Descriptions of the drawing:

Figure 1 is the illustration of the overall drug ordering process.

Figure 2A - 2F illustrates healthcare provider ordering interface screens displayed on their mobile.

Figure 3 illustrates the process involved in sending the orders to the distributors.

Detailed Descriptions of the drawings:

Figure 1 is the bird eye view of the drug ordering process. Each healthcare provider would download the App 101 to their mobile device. Once they have logged in successfully, they will be able to start ordering the drugs. All the mobile Apps 100 users will submit their orders 102 to the backend 103. The backend 103 consist of server 104 and database 05. The server 104 will process the orders and save the order informations to the database 105. The process involved grouping the orders by each distributor 108. Once the processing of the orders completed, the server 104 will send the orders 106 to the respective drug distributors 107.

Figure 2A - 2F illustrates healthcare provider ordering interface screens displayed on their mobile. Upon launching the App from their mobile, the first screen Figure 2A will show up. The healthcare provider would need to key in their User ID and Password to login 200. Once they have successfully log in, Figure 2B will show up, with the first tab 201 , indicated as Item, selected by default. This screens show all the available drugs that they can order. They can also search 203 the drugs by name, content, company and category of the drugs. When they tap on one of the drug 202, Figure 2C will show up, explained in the paragraph.

Figure 2C show the details of the drug that the healthcare tapped from the item tab 201. In this screen, the healthcare provider can input the quantity 204, bonus 205 and remarks 206. They can then tapped the Add To Cart 207 button to add this drug to the cart, shown in Figure 2D, indicated as Cart 208 tab. Once they had confirm their drugs, they can proceed to placed their order by tapping the Place Order 209 button. They orders will then sent to the backend for processing.

Figure 2E show the list of orders made by the healthcare providers, indicated in My Orders 210 tab. When the healthcare provider tapped on one of the order 211 , Figure 2F will show up to display the detail of the single order. The drugs are grouped by distributors.

Figure 3 illustrates the process involved in sending the orders to the distributors in the backend. When the orders are received 300 by the backend, the orders will be grouped by distributor 301. This process is necessary as healthcare providers might order drugs from various distributors. The next step will be generating the purchase order 302 for each distributor with the healthcare provider information inside. After that the purchase order will be converted to fax or email 303 and send to the respective distributors 304.