eMedication - a smartphone-based e-medication system for hospitalized patients

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this research was to develop a smartphone based e-medication app for hospitalized patients at the University Hospital of North Norway (UNN). The app was expected to provide an overview of medication that the patient is given during hospitalization. Motivation: E-medication has become widely popular in many countries, and has replaced the paper-based prescription. This replacement has enhanced the quality of the medication process and reduced medication error from handwritten prescription. Unfortunately, e-medication for patients has not yet been implemented in Norwegian hospitals. This we wanted to change. This e-medication app for hospitalized patient will reduce medication error as well as increase the quality of medication management. Methods: E-medication system, a smartphone based application was developed to address the problems mentioned above. The application was implemented on an Android platform with help of Android studio using xml and the Java programming language. The application design was achieved after requirement and suggestions were collected through relevant literature review as well as different expert groups were consulted. After the design phase, the project was implemented based on the requirements. The final phase of testing was performed using questionnaire and participants gave feedbacks based on user experience as well as observing demo of the application. Finally, test results were analyzed and discussed later. Results: Although the testing time was short which lacks proper testing of the application, but the application was quite user friendly and quite successful in achieving its intended task based on feedback from the 31 participants. The app was impressive in keeping a friendly user interface and easy to use application. As a whole, people were quite satisfied by the application and likely motivated to share it with friends and colleagues. Conclusion: Prescription details were effortlessly embedded into the app. Due to use of color concept, simple design, friendly user interface as a main feature of the prototype helped participants to get motivated to use and give positive feedbacks. This feedback gave us promising results. For efficient implementation of project, manual data were used to show how the inside of app looks. Essential feedbacks and suggestion from the test results can be adopted in near future.