SEO

Introduction

Who is nuPharma?

Experts in the medical field, NuPharma own and operate several pharmacies in Calgary and the surrounding area. Recognizing the need to bring pharmacy services more directly and efficiently to customers, NuPharma expanded on existing prescription fulfillment models to offer its customers an end-to-end digital service that incorporates payment and delivery alongside the submission of a prescription or refill request by a doctor or patient, all without any extra charge. 

The Problem

People have busy lives and it isn’t always convenient or cost-effective to go in person to the pharmacy to submit a prescription, wait for it to be fulfilled or return later to pick it up. Online services are typically restricted to prescription refills and you still need to go in person to pick up your refilled medication, which may not be ready on the same day you requested it. The same goes for a new prescription, even if your doctor has been able to submit it directly to the pharmacy on your behalf. 

NuPharma saw a serious problem in how patients are positioned throughout the whole prescription fulfillment process. To them, the process works relatively well for pharmacists and doctors, but not for the patients that they are trying to help. NuPharma realized that patients’ needs had to be put first and they wanted to create a process that would enable faster turnaround of fulfillments as well as provide patients with a choice as to how and when they wanted to receive their medication.

The Solution

Through shared contacts in the community, NuPharma knew of Poeta Digital’s proven track record working with startups to identify key technological needs and create product roadmaps for new ideas and applications.  NuPharma trusted Poeta to streamline the internal pharmacy process and provide end-to-end service for the patient/customer. 

In September 2022, Poeta used an Agile software development process to design a proof of concept, deploy it to market, and figure out low touch integration with the existing internal pharmacy process. The proof of concept was successful and Poeta has been making iterative improvements ever since based on client and user feedback. 

Following the principles of AWS’ (Amazon Web Services) well-architected framework, Poeta designed the NuPharma prescription fulfillment service to be delivered on highly responsive, stable, and cost-optimized infrastructure. And to fully ensure that all personal and identifiable medical information is stored in a secure encrypted fashion, Poeta leveraged AWS’ CloudFormation to provision and manage resources including EC2 and RDS servers, S3, IAM, and KMS within a secure virtual private cloud adhering to best practices for security and scalability. 

Currently the application Poeta has built and deployed is web responsive and allows for full ease of use by both pharmacist and patient; next steps are to introduce a full mobile application, then optical character recognition tools.

The Result

Following the principles of AWS’ (Amazon Web Services) well-architected framework, Poeta designed the NuPharma prescription fulfillment service to be delivered on highly responsive, stable, and cost-optimized infrastructure. By leveraging AWS CloudFormation to provision and manage resources, Poeta ensures that all personal and identifiable medical information is stored in a secure encrypted fashion. The application built and deployed by Poeta is web responsive and allows for full ease of use by both pharmacist and patient; next steps are to introduce a full mobile application, then optical character recognition tools.