May 11, 2020There was a huge demand earlier during pandemic for Online Medicine Delivery Apps. But the question is has the demand gone down? The answer in one word is NO! As soon as the lockdown was announced in various countries, people went into a frenzy about daily essentials. People were taken over by the fear of the limited amount of medicines at the stores, the closing of businesses. They immediately rushed to their nearby stores to stock all the necessary medicines, toilet paper, and hand sanitizers. Due to this sudden attack on retail and medicine stores. Things got out of hand which made political leaders of various countries to address their particular nations on live television. They had to assure the citizens of shortage in supply of important supplies and everything is taken care of.
Other supplies can be managed but for medicines, people don’t want to be with no stock in such tough times. People want to store as much medicine as they could during this quarantine phase. But make sure that everybody gets their share of mediation, health plans were introduced. The online medicine delivery apps helped us out in that period of hardships. These medicine delivery apps were helping us to stay together despite being at a distance from each other.
Importance of Medicine Delivery Apps in COVID-19 phase:
– If you own a Medical Shop:
Since people are not allowed to leave their homes in this quarantine phase, medicine delivery apps have the huge task of delivering medicines door to door. Whenever the stock of medicines is about to finish in a household, a person can contact the medicine delivery app. A person representing the app will arrive to provide all the necessary needed.
Along with services of household delivery, these medicine delivery apps also save a lot of time and energy of the users. In routine life, the person had to visit the medical store which would have consumed a lot of his time. DDS (Drug delivery systems) are the one that handles the delivery of medicines and makes sure that the delivery is done on time. On top of all this, these apps also provide people with the option of consulting a doctor or medical professional virtually and therefore eliminating the risk of stepping outside. But all these tech solutions can only be beneficial if users are willing to make use of them.
– If you have a stock of Medicines:
It is not necessary that all the medicines of the city can only be accessed through the medical dispensary. The importance of medicine ordering apps can be felt here as they provide punctual deliveries of required medicines. There is a possible chance that some of the medicines in your home stock have passed their expiry dates and needs to be replaced. And at times, the drugs present in the house might not have the desired quality or might have got damaged because of the negligence of the house members.
Online Medicine delivery apps to the rescue in all these situations. You get an excellent deal on quality medicines as these apps provide medicines at much lower costs and also offers significant discounts. One can also check the details of a specific medicine prescribed by the medical authorities. Dosage intake a particular medicine can also be determined using the interface of these medicine delivery apps. Another impressive quality of these medicine delivery apps is that they provide their services not only in the urban areas but also to the people who reside in remote and distant areas.
Challenges in front of Telemedicine Industry due to COVID-19
- Coronavirus has spread at a rapid pace which has left medical authorities of all the countries bamboozled as it has created an imbalance between the facilities and abilities of medical establishments. The apt treatment for this disease is yet to be found and that is why telemedical industries are finding it hard to provide a proper consultation.
- Due to the sudden nature of this outbreak, a bridge is created between the facilities and ability to supply medication. Providing supply of medicine to highly populated areas has become even harder and this is creating a lot of problems for the telemedicine industry as large amount of stock is also required in these areas.
- The in-person arrival of delivery person can prove to be fatal as this disease is infectious and highly contagious.
- There is a sudden decrease in the availability of medical equipments such as face-covering masks and hand-rubs as these are paramount in fight against coronavirus. Now, since demand of these equipments has risen, there are high chances that the quality might get reduced.
- In the present scenario, a practitioner or a doctor is only paid if a senior of his is physically present in the facility premesis. Patient’s home cannot be considered as a facility so the doctor has to treat the patient by visiting the nearby medical institution. But all the travelling in this process can prove to be highly dangerous for the patient.
- Seniors are the one which are most at the risk of falling to the hands of COVID-19 as they have low immunity levels. So taking care of them with high protection and proper sanitisation has become the need of the hour.
- Patients may face interruptions in placing order for the medication due to a lot of reasons, for example bad weather conditions and these hiccups may prove to be fatal for a person in urgent need of drugs.
Basic features of Medicine Delivery App:
1. Profile: A person needs to create a profile by uploading his name, delivery location and other necessary details in order to buy medicine online. Connection with EHR systems such as My Health Record is must.
2. Prescription: Patients has the option of sending their medical prescriptions after scanning it with the mobile camera of their phones.
3. Coverage through insurance: There are a lot of insurance companies that cover the medication of some patients and if this is true in your case than you need to link their program with your insurance providers.
4. Search process: Search bar is made available to the users using which they can search for a specific doctor, medicine, its price, or even delivery accessibility.
5. Payments: All types of payment methods are available for the users which makes the experience for the users very unique. Users can seamlessly perform their transactions using any mode of payment according to their convenience.
6. Notifications: If a person buying some sort of medicine on a regular basis then he has the option of switching on notifications that will remind him of future medicines. So, if the user is running out of his medicines then the system will order new medicines by itself and deduct the amount from the card that was used on previous occasions.
7. Ratings: Customers need to have a platform through which they can rate their experience regarding the delivery services of the app. If any error has occurred in the overall process, like delivering the medicine to the wrong house, then the customer should be able to report this type of nuisance.
8. Scheduled delivery of medicine: Sometimes, medicine delivery apps provide a three-hour window, but in the case of immediate medicine delivery apps, day-to-day delivery services are offered to the customers.
9. Automatic medicine refills: Users have an option of monthly refills and when you opt for it then the medicine providers deliver your monthly medicines without any hiccup and you never run out of your monthly dosage.
10. Contact form: The option of reaching the medicine pharmacies to clear out some queries should be provided to the customers. This process can be made a lot easier by providing a contact form.
Features of Delivery Agent Version:
• Navigation: A delivery agent should provide the customers with maps and navigation within the medicine delivery app so that the customers can reach out to pharmacies in case of emergency.
• Notifications: After the pharmacy has confirmed an order from the user, the delivery agent should be immediately notified either via an SMS or call. The main purpose of this feature is to maintain a seamless connection between the user and the medicine delivery app.
• Profile: Delivery providers need to a secured user profile along with legal and original identities to create a rapport with the medicine delivery app. They can set their working hours and the location in which they want to work in by mentioning them in their profiles.
Read More: How to Develop a Telemedicine app on the concept of Doctor on Demand?
Features of Pharmacy Admin Version:
• Pharmacy page: Every users should have the luxury of choosing their preferable pharmaceutical provider and the admin should make their task easier by providing all the necessary information about the available prescription medicine, its source & terms and conditions of the delivery.
• Chatbot integration: To save humans from an extra amount of work, these delivery apps are integrated with AI-powered chatbots that help out users with FAQs and other queries.
• Pharmaceutical CMS integration: CMS plays a very important part in forming a bond between the app admin and users of the app.
• Managing the orders: A licensed pharmacist should be handed over the task of handling all prescriptions and various orders. The app should be able to receive prescription files, orders, accept and decline requests.
• Behaviour tracking: This tracks the prominent behavior of a particular user in terms of buying the medicine and then whenever that customer opens the app again, it displays that prominent item on the top of his buying list.
• Integration of inventory management: It is very helpful for retailers in case they want to manage products on the medicine delivery application.
• Role-based dashboards: Such feature proves of great help for the admin in keeping track of a particular category of stuff.
• Flexible mode of payments: Additional convenience is offered to the user due to flexible mode of payments. This feature mainly provides benefits to the users as it provides flexibility in the method of payments to the customers.
• Lab Aggregation: Another one of the user convenience methods as with the help of this, the user can select any location for a test according to his convenience. On top of this, users don’t even have to go to the lab again to collect the samples as reports of these samples will be sent straight to their homes by the lab experts.
• CMS Integration: CMS integration is a tool that allows the admin to manage the content on the medicine delivery app. He can add and delete data according to his experience and make the app work more efficiently.
• Tools for marketing: These tools are available for both admin and retailers. Both of them can run their personal advertising campaigns in order to lure large numbers of customers towards the medicine delivery app.
Also Read: Doctor on Demand Mobile App Development Cost and Key Features
Needs and methods to create a Medicine Delivery App:
Paramount needs to embark on this adventurous journey of creating an attractive medicine delivery app is an expert along with a certified team of experienced professionals in the field of medicine delivery app development. These developers need to be visionary so that they can get on the same page with your ideas and vision as quickly as they can to convert these ideas into reality.
The designations that are involved in the creation of a Medicine Delivery App
- Project Manager
- Backend App developers
- Android and ios developers
- Graphic Designers
- QA Testers
- UI/UX designers
Project managers and developers might vary according to the requirements of the project.
The tech stack that is needed to develop medicine delivery app:
- For Push Notifications- Twilio, Push.io
- For payments- Braintree, Paypal, Stripe E-wallets
- For SMS, voice, and phone verification- Nexmo, Twilio
- For Database- MongoDB, HBase, Cassandra, Postgres, Mailchimp integration
- For real-time analytics- Hadoop, Spark, Apache Flink, Big Data, Cisco, IBM.
Working process of Medicine Delivery App:
The most important solution that a medicine delivery app provides is connecting to the necessary services directly and allowing tracking routes. Most of the industries in today’s world are looking out for this in a delivery app. Working process of a medicine delivery app is very much similar to Uber as the user can create a profile, complete an order, pay for it, and then track the order in real-time.
But the medication services are a little bit more complex than any other delivery services as in this the user first has to provide a prescription. After that, the prescription is verified by the medical pharmacist. Rules around electronic prescription and online prescription exchange are governed by a nationally regulated system.
Also, Read: Online Medicines Delivery App Development Cost and Features
Apart from all this, medicine delivery apps are an important part of telehealth apps as patients can find qualified medical professionals and practitioners and can also order their needed medication in one place. So it can be concluded that it is a complicated field of development that craves more attention from healthcare professionals.
Advantages of Developing a Medicine Delivery App:
- Customers don’t have to move an inch and they will be able to receive their medication at their doorstep, especially in the scenario of a medical emergency.
- This hour of COVID-19 provides greater opportunities for pharmacies to multifold their benefits.
- It has eased the pressure off inventory by timely checks of expiry dates.
- Covid-19 has opened the eyes of the world to look for a large number of alternatives.
- Highly advantageous for regular customers as they can refill their orders.
Conclusion:
In this situation of COVID-19 where there is a larger need of medication and people are not allowed to go out of their households, creating a medicine delivery app would strike gold for you. It also serves a great opportunity for drug delivery companies to preside over the market by creating mobile solutions, as people are not allowed a visit to medical shops.
