Electronic Prescription Management System

Product

The goal of this project was to provide a wireless replacement to a physician's prescription pad. The primary motivation was to eliminate the expensive paperwork that occured between the prescription being written and the prescription being communicated the pharmacy. To accomplish this, the prescription system must:

• Provide an accurate drug database, organized by thereputic category and insurance provider formulary
• Automatically, wirelessly update this database when new formulary information is provided
• Track incoming patients and their insurance provider
• When prescribing, present drugs for a given thereputic category organized by cost and coverage by the patient's insurance plan
• Allow the physician to override formulary and prescribe any indicated drug
• Wirelessly transmit a prescription to a clinic or hospital server for processing
• Allow the physician to indicate the patient's preferred pharmacy for pickup
• When the server receives a new prescription, it must fax the prescription to the patient's preferred pharmacy
• All prescription information must then be entered into the patient's medical records

What we provided

The database and local area wirless network requirements dictated the product would be Windows CE 2.1 based, with a Proxim Wireless LAN as the communications mechanism. We chose Pocket Internet Explorer as our User Interface.

Our first problem was the lack of guaranteed message delivery in this generation of Proxim LAN cards. This neccessitated the development of a guaranteed messaging system for the application. On the server end, this was solved quite easily with MSMQ. Unfortunately, MSMQ was not available for Windows CE at the time. Instead, we developed a CE based guarateed messaging queue to communicate with MSMQ.

The next challenge was mixing SQL queries of the drug database into the HTML pages representing the Windows CE device's User Interface. HTML scripting support was not included with this version of Windows CE (version 2.1). Instead, we developed our own scripting language (essentially a mild extension of HTML to support SQL queries) and developed a micro proxy server for the CE device to render this modified HTML into standard HTML to be passed to Pocket Internet Explorer.

With these technical hurdles passed, system development proceded on schedule. Database schema were designed and implemented. Client and server software was written and fax machine support was brought on-line. The system was delivered to a clinic in Santa Barbara, CA. Typical throughput for a prescription was under two minutes from the physician entering the prescription to the prescription printing in a distant pharmacy.