Medicine Delivery Network
The mobility issue caused due to the lock-down has impacted the people who relied on public transport to get essential medical supplies, doctors visit etc.
The global pandemic has had huge impact on the people who relied mostly on public transport to get their needs done like buying grocery, medicine, essential supplies, regular doctor consultation etc. There will also be lots of people either can’t get to the medical store or aren’t willing to risk going out.
Affected people
Elderly citizen who relied majorly on taxis, rickshaws, on-demand taxis, etc
Disabled people and their dependents (children, parents, etc.)
People who already have low immunity levels
People who do not own private vehicles
Impacts
The already weakened health can further deteriorate and can lead to worsened health conditions and can even lead to death.
If the volume further increases it can lead to insufficient public care facilities, exponentially increasing the gravity of the problem.
People can start to violate the lockdown restrictions and start taking actions to get the essential medicines for their dependents. This can lead to a riot.
Centrally controlled hyper-local medicine delivery system
Non-functional requirements for the solution and analysis of Indian scenarios
The lockdown is nationwide and requires a solution that works in the urban and the rural areas of the country.
The solutions should be available in local languages.
The medicine should be delivered possibly on the same day or within 3 hours, as there is a chance that people can order the medicine whenever it is out of stock.
Some medicines will be available from the local public health centers. If not, it can be purchased from the local pharmacies.
The payment needs to be contactless to decrease the chances of spreading the virus. (UPI can be introduced, since the digital payment revolution started after demonetization; we already have people equipped with the payment technology). A mandate from the government-level needs to be thought about to make UPI enabled in all associated phone numbers.
All citizens may not have access to smartphones, people with feature phones should also be able to access the facility. (Less than 30% of the nation's population has access to smartphones as per 2017 data.)
The current systems lack the (1,2,3,4) crucial working nature or there are no such platforms that exist for this unique problem.
This solution needs to be built from scratch and deployed rapidly.
The solution and proposed working of Superhero network based medicine delivery
The proposed system can be built as a part of the existing Superhero app. Citizens can make calls and request access via the Super App for consumers. If the request is made via the app, the prescription needs to be uploaded by the citizen; otherwise the prescription needs to be collected by the volunteer. The system collects a request and sends a volunteer to fulfill and deliver the medicine request the same day. The volunteers procure medicine from the local medical shops, PHCs in citizens area and delivers it.
Scenario 1 (Request made from feature phone)
If the request is made via call, the control room executive need to collect the necessary information like medicine requirement, Name and location information (District, Panchayath and ward, nearest landmark) once these are entered, the system will automatically send notification to the volunteers who are registered in same Panchayat or ward. The volunteer now needs to collect the prescription from the citizen's home.
Scenario 2 (Request made from Smartphone)
If the request is made from Supernetwork application, then the citizen need to give his name, prescription via the application, the system will automatically fetch his location and nearest volunteers will get notified. The volunteers can accept the request. Once the request is accepted, volunteer can see the prescription.
Prescription to medicine collection to delivery.
Once a volunteer accepts the request for medicine and prescription is available, volunteer can start the process of finding and procuring the medicine. This can be done by a maximum of 3 steps.
The volunteer can navigate to the nearest Public Health Centre (PHC) using the Superhero application.
The officials in PHC checks if the medicine is available is PHC, if yes the volunteer collects the medicine and contact the citizen who requested the medicine and confirms the location and navigate to the citizen's home and delivers the medicine.
If the medicine is not available in the PHC volunteer gets a list of nearest medical shops, he navigates to one of them, and procures the medicine and deliver it to the citizens home once the home location of citizen is confirmed.
Once the volunteer has reached the medical shop, he can show the prescription and the phone number/ UPI / UPI QR code to the shop owner. The shop owner now places a request to the citizens UPI number. On receiving the payment request citizen can make the payment via UPI. Once the payment is collected medicine is collected by the volunteer. The detailed workflow can be found here.
Once the medicine is delivered the volunteer can mark the delivery completed and he is ready for the next request.
Prerequisites
The medical shops and Public Health centers need to be on-boarded in the system
The volunteer registration can be done via Superhero app done in phase 1. (By providing app updates)
Call centers need to be setup to coordinate the feature phone requests and volunteer management.
Access to PHC and medical shop data.
The volunteers need to be attracted to the platform to support the society.
Last updated