What is the name of your organization?
International Vaccine Institute
What is the name of your solution?
Dispensary: Digital Pharmacy
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
From Paper to Pixels: Driving Smarter Antibiotic Use Through Digital Innovations
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Seoul, South Korea
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
KOR
What type of organization is your solution team?
Nonprofit
Film your elevator pitch.
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What specific problem are you solving?
Weak pharmaceutical supply chains, poor inventory management, and inadequate sales tracking contribute to antibiotic misuse and the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Our solution, Dispensary, is an open-access digital tool that streamlines pharmacy operations—enabling effective stock control, tracking of controlled substances including antimicrobials, and allowing pharmacists to prioritize patient care. In low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) like Bangladesh and Madagascar, many community pharmacies still operate with paper-based systems. This leads to frequent stockouts, expired medicines, and untraceable sales. Over-the-counter antibiotic sales, incomplete dosages, and informal distribution further accelerate resistance. In rural areas, up to 70% of pharmacies report stock outs or dispense expired drugs. According to WHO’s GLASS report, resistance rates to key antibiotics reach up to 50%, highlighting the need for urgent action. Dispensary tackles these issues by digitizing procurement, inventory, and prescription records, offering critical value in data-scarce settings. When deployed nationally or regionally, it can generate reliable data on antibiotic use, informing AMR policies and enhancing stewardship efforts. After successful implementation of our proposal, we aim to deliver a scalable, cost-effective framework for pharmacy digitalization, enhancing inventory oversight and prescription traceability—empowering health ministries to improve antibiotic governance and AMR response strategies.
What is your solution?
Our solution is a cloud-based, AI-powered digital health platform designed to enhance drugs and antibiotic stock control and prescription management. It integrates three components: Dispensary (Pharmacy Management System), e-Prescription module, and a desktop app to ensure accurate inventory tracking, prescription accuracy, and improved access to essential medicines. Dispensary offers real-time inventory control, expiry tracking, damage control, point of sale (PoS), cashbook to manage income and expenses, product & vendor management to prevent stockouts and overstocking. e-Prescription provides a digital record of prescriptions. The desktop app extends access to Dispensary to users in low-connectivity settings, featuring offline PoS functionality and automated data sync. Our platform uses Machine Learning for predictive stock forecasting and analysis of antibiotic sales. It also incorporates Natural Language Processing (NLP) for querying data insights and generating AMU reports. Built using microservices, and cloud infrastructure, it ensures scalability, security, and interoperability with global health systems via HL7/FHIR standards. This integrated solution strengthens antibiotic stewardship, empowers pharmacists and clinicians with actionable insights, and supports data-driven decisions, ultimately reducing misuse and improving antibiotic availability in underserved communities.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Our solution primarily serves pharmacists, healthcare providers, patients, and policymakers across LMICs who face critical challenges in managing antibiotics effectively. Pharmacists frequently rely on paper-based records, leading to a greater risk of stockouts, wastage, and the unintentional issuance of expired drugs. As prescriptions are not necessarily archived, retrospective quality control aspects may be harder to check for. Our Dispensary platform offers automated stock control, expiry tracking, PoS, product and vendor management that streamline pharmacy operations and ensure accountability. Healthcare providers often struggle with handwritten prescriptions and limited tools to track patient adherence. Our e-Prescription module enhances dispensing quality by enabling pharmacies to review previous prescriptions. With scanned prescriptions and desktop versions of Dispensary, pharmacy owners get insights of sales, income and expense summary, stock out products, expired medicines and nearest expiry tracking. Policymakers and public health officials with access to pharmacy data can greatly benefit from real-time insights into antibiotic usage, enabling the development of evidence-based strategies to combat antimicrobial resistance (AMR).