Overview With the country's foreign exchange reserves depleted, the nationalized health system could not afford to import drugs and medical supplies in sufficient quantities. Sri Lanka depends on imports for about 85% of its pharmaceutical needs and about 80% of its medical supplies. The country imported $815 million worth of drugs in 2021, but as of May only had about $25 million in foreign exchange reserves to pay for imports of all kinds. Sri Lanka's 3,500-bed National Hospital in Colombo, which normally has 1,300 medicines in stock, currently requires only 60 of the most essential drugs.
The socio-economic crisis in Sri Lanka has put pressure on the healthcare system, resulting in a shortage of many important drugs and medical supplies in both the public and private sectors. Drug costs have also grown 30% island-wide at the same time. Through close collaboration with the Ministry of Health, UNDP and WHO was able to identify gaps in the distribution of medications, consumables, equipment, and devices across the nation. As a result, these crucial and critical drugs and medical supplies have been acquired.
The majority of Sri Lanka's medications were formerly imported, but with the country's current lack of foreign currency, chances of doing so are slim. The price of prescription drugs increased by 40% in April 2022. Due to the economic crisis nowadays Sri Lankan government hospitals do not have at least 25% of listed medicines. so, patients have to collect them from pharmacies. But due to the economic crisis, 60% of Sri Lankans income has been reduced to a low budget with the dollar crisis, and as well as their 5% of unemployed too. Therefore, all people try to buy them for the least cost that is affordable to them as well as hope to find those medicines at the nearest pharmacy.
In some areas patients are being turned away from hospitals and clinics due to the severe medicine shortage, which prevents them from receiving the necessary care. Most of them have chronic, incapacitating illnesses like diabetes, asthma, heart issues, and epilepsy. Every day they go without taking their prescription raises the possibility of complications, which could cause their diseases to significantly worsen or perhaps end fatally. Together with basic needed medications like Paracetamol, antibiotics, and pediatrics formulations, vital medications for the treatment of malaria are also in extremely short supply.
Even though the current situation within the healthcare industry is worse like this, some pharmacies and hospitals are available with medicines in some amounts. As a software engineering undergraduate, you have to create a platform to connect people with those pharmacies and hospitals. In the platform that you are creating, users should be able to search for a medicine and check whether the availability of that medicine in the registered pharmacies and hospitals.
We propose to build an online pharmacy directory that will help users find the nearest pharmacies in Sri Lanka that have the medicines they need. The application will have the following features:
General Users (Citizens of Sri Lanka) should be able to search for medicines by their name, and the application should show them the nearest pharmacies that have those medicines in stock. You can be creative to improve this search function as it's the Main and Only Part available to the General users. (Study what happened with the initial Fuel Pass Application)
The application will have a directory of all the pharmacies in Sri Lanka, which users should be able to search by medicine, location, name, or any other relevant criteria.
The application will keep track of the availability of essential medicines in each pharmacy. This information will be updated in Real-Time, so users can be sure that the information is up to date as this system could affect someone's life.
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The application should be built as a web application, using any modern web framework.
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The application should use an efficient database to store information about pharmacies and the availability of medicines.
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Pharmacies should be able to register in the system but the Admin should approve them before they can login and add their inventory.
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All the Major entities (such as Pharmacies, Medicines, etc.…) should have full CRUD (Create, Read, Update Delete) operations and both API and your solutions should be able to demonstrate it.
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The application should use an “API First” Approach. RESTful APIs should be used to communicate between the Backend and the Frontend. Note: You can use an API Manager Platform (Postman/insomnia) when demonstrating APIs.
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All Endpoints must use proper HTTP Status codes to indicate the status of the request.
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The application architecture should be able to handle a large number of users and the Database should be able to handle large volumes of data in an efficient manner.
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The application should be secure, with appropriate measures taken to protect user data and prevent unauthorized access.
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For any internal Users, use of General Auth Providers is not recommended. For example, using Google Auth or Firebase Auth is not recommended for Internal Users such as Admins or Pharmacies.
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Apart from the core functionality Quality of life features may be awarded extra points.
| Feature | Score |
|---|---|
| Database | 140 |
| Pharmacy APIs | 180 |
| Medicine APIs | 40 |
| Pharmacy Dashboard | 115 |
| Admin Dashboard | 45 |
| Search UI/API | 80 |
| UI/UX | 100 |
| Teamwork | 150 |
| Video Submission | 100 |
| Final Submission | 50 |
This task contributes 25% of the overall competition mark for Duothan. The panel of judges monitors your progress hour by hour. Then the points related to your task will be calculated according to your current score status. You can use any suitable database to store information and pass it to the client through an API.
This task contributes 20% of the overall competition mark for Duothan. The panel of judges monitors your progress hour by hour. Then the points related to your task will be calculated according to your current score status.
- Authentication (Sign Up/Sign In)
- Inventory Management
- Pharmacy Profile
- Authentication
- Pharmacies Table
- Approve & Manage Pharmacies
- Search Medicine
- Filter Results by location
Figma wireframe.
You can submit your project in this repository's this discussion thread.