NFC-MEDMANAGE: PHARMACY AND MEDICATION MANAGEMENT USING NFC TECHNOLOGY

Abstract

Saudi Arabia and most countries in the world suffer greatly from excessive drugs that are not
used after obtaining greater quantities of needs miscalculation waste of medicines and
follow-up history. A study by the clinical pharmacist in the department of oncology and
hematology in the national guard health affairs found also that “there is a waste of drugs
estimated at 500 million riyals annually, and the budget of medicine in the Kingdom is
estimated at six or seven billion Riyals annually [2], [17].
Therefore, our project NFC-MedManage aims to minimize the huge waste of medicines and to
reduce the problems of medication dispenses and waste in pharmacies. The proposed system
uses NFC enabled smartphones and each medicine packet is tagged by NFC tag, which
contains all medicines information and saving its details in the database. Pharmacists scan each
medicine before storing it in the pharmacy inventory to list and count each medicine in the
pharmacy. After that, pharmacists can scan each medicine tag before giving it to a patient to
ensure its validity in terms of expiry date and package status. By doing so, pharmacists can
check medicine validity in a short time. Suppliers are also able to have a quick automatic
overview of each pharmacy status in terms of medicine wastage and inventory shortage. This
application helps pharmacists to manage medicines and follow-up periodically and help
supplier companies to follow pharmacies and improve distribution methods and expected
production ratio. It also helps the company to efficiently track the damaged medicines and
manage the pharmacy waste containers by getting rid of damaged medicines better.