GHANA TECHNOLOGY UNIVERSITY COLLEGE (GTUC)

FACULTY OF COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS

BACHELOR OF SCIENCE IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

FINAL YEAR PROJECT PROPOSAL

TOPIC:

WEB BASED PHARMACY SYSTEM

BY:

ABROKWAH SHADRACK ABOAGYE 04TU918239

AFFUL RICHARD KWABENA 04TU918164

 ABSTRACT
In today’s rapidly changing world of e-commerce, about almost everything can be bought
over the internet and delivered right to your doorstep. Virtually every day there is news of yet
another company selling some type of product online. Included in this mass of products is
prescription medications. Not only is it possible to order prescribed medications over the
internet, in some cases it is even not necessary to be examined or to consult a doctor. To
some, this type of ‘online medicine’ is an affront to traditional medicine, as well as
potentially dangerous customers. For customers, the idea of ordering from an online or web
based pharmacy is interesting for several reasons; lower cost and convenience for elderly
people. In addition to this advantage there are still substantial risks. This include the access to
illegal or unapproved drugs, medication offered without a prescription and drugs marketed
with fake health claims.
CONTENTS
ABSTRACT.........................................................................................................................................ii
CHAPTER ONE..................................................................................................................................1
1.1 Introduction...............................................................................................................................1
1.2 Background of Study.............................................................................................................1
CHAPTER TWO.................................................................................................................................4
2.1 LITERATURE REVIEW.........................................................................................................4
2.2 Reviewed Systems..................................................................................................................5
2.2.1 1mg.......................................................................................................................................5
2.2.2 Inayo....................................................................................................................................6
CHAPTER THREE.............................................................................................................................7
3.1 METHODOLOGY....................................................................................................................7
Agile Development Methodology................................................................................................7
Development.................................................................................................................................8
SCHEDULE AND TIMEFRAME......................................................................................................9
RESOURCES.......................................................................................................................................9
REFERENCES..................................................................................................................................10

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 CHAPTER ONE
1.1 Introduction
A pharmacy is the science and technique of preparing and dispensing drug. It is a health
profession that links health sciences with chemical sciences and aims to ensure the safe and
effective use of pharmaceutical drugs. The scope of pharmacy practice includes more
traditional roles such as compounding and dispensing medications, and it also includes
modern services related to health care including clinical services, reviewing medications for
safety and efficacy, and providing drug information. Pharmacists, therefore, are the experts
on drug therapy and are the primary health professionals who optimize use of medication for
the benefit of patients.

1.2 Background of Study

A web based pharmacy or an online pharmacy is a pharmacy that basically operates over the
internet. It sends orders to customers mostly through the mail or shipping companies. Some
people express their view that there is the actual need for these kinds of systems. Ordering
systems from isolated computers and personal PC’s are not accessible from everywhere.
Whereas these kinds of web-related systems can be accessed from anywhere, literally from
any part of the world without difficulty all you need is an internet connection and a Pc. As
our online pharmacy is launching a new website with these benefits of the internet, they can
provide better cost and effective services to customers, not only that but with this kind of
system customers will find it easier to navigate our website. Realization of these kind of
systems includes the gathering of many technologies at one point. Implementation of this
system will involve both server-side programming and client-side programming. The internet
has facilitated a major proliferation of mail-order pharmacy operations. Mail order
pharmacies are not new, they have served the Americans since the late 1800s. Web based
pharmacies often referred to as “online pharmacies”, can be defined as websites that sell
prescription medication over the internet that is dispensed by mail-order. When they began
operating in the mid to late 1990s, online pharmacies became a subject of concern for federal
regulators and congress due to dangerous and illicit practices. The NABP created the Verified
Internet Pharmacy practices Sites (VIPPS) in 1999, a voluntary program to open domestic
pharmacies to help consumers identify safe online pharmacies.

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1.3 Problem Statement
One of the existing issues concerning online pharmacies or web based pharmacies are
complications. Most customers get frustrated when they come across complicated
navigations, overwhelming options and unnecessary details. Studies by Forrester’s research
estimated that approximately 50% of sales are lost because potential customers are unable to
find what they are looking for.

Another problem associated with online pharmacy is illegal or unethical pharmacies sending
out counterfeit medication. The web page for these illegal pharmacies may contain lie about
its home country, procedures or certifications. They may send outdated or expired medication
and may not follow normal procedural safeguards. Fake online pharmacies can manipulate
their website to appear legitimate, so checking the pharmacy’s license through your state
bound of pharmacy is an important step to know whether you are using a safe and legal
online pharmacy.

Children or minors ordering controlled substances is also another problem related to online
pharmacies. They may place orders of medications that may not be good for their health. It is
very important to verify the age of a customer before allowed to place orders for certain
medications. In Ghana, people face challenges when it comes to buying prescribed
medication online. We came up with this proposal to create a system to enable responsible
individuals to purchase medication without going through the stress of going from one
pharmacy to the other to buy a particular medication which may be scarce.

1.4 Aims and Objective

1.4.1Aims
The main aim of this study is to design and develop a web-based pharmacy system that will
allow users create an account, log in and make purchases for various medications.

1.4.2 Objectives
 Review and analyze the existing or current drug purchase pharmacy system to identify
challenges.
 Model or design a web-based system to help purchase or deliver drugs to customers.

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  Develop an online or web-based pharmacy system.

1.5 Significance of Study

 Academia

It will add to the body of knowledge and also serve as a guide for researchers who would
want to improve upon it or undertake similar projects.

 Society

It will make it easier for individuals to place orders at the comfort of their homes and at their
own convenience.

 Industry

We will have much faster delivery mechanisms.

1.6 Scope
Our system is only going to work for purchases within Greater Accra within the few months
of operation, but with time other regions will begin to benefit from it.

1.7 Limitation
 Our system may not provide drug information about drug composition which may not
give an insight whether it has side effects at a glance.
 Our payments options will strictly be cash on delivery or mobile money. Credit card
users may not be able to make purchases within the first few months of being in
operation.

1.8 Organization
Chapter one covers the background, problems associated with online pharmacies and the
purpose of our research with clear aims and objectives.

In chapter two we will review existing systems associated with our project which will include
the purpose of the system not leaving out its various founders.

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 CHAPTER TWO
2.1 LITERATURE REVIEW
This is the chapter where we review other systems that in one way or the other has a relation
to our proposed system; doing so we get to understand the in depth of how the design of the
project is all about. Thus getting the concepts and knowledge through the steps they used in
developing the related projects. A pharmacist is a medical professional who dispenses drugs
to patients according to a prescription ordered by a physician or other clinician. Although
people have been using medicinal substances to treat themselves for as far back as there have
been people, the pharmacy profession has a more recent origin. The pharmacy profession can
be traced back at least as far as the Sumerian population, living in the modern day Iraq from
around 4000BC; they used medicinal plants such as liquor ice, mustard, myrrh and opium.
There were separate people who worked to prepare medicines as separate role from diagnosis
and treatment which was carried out by medics. These precursors to pharmacists also
combined their role with that of a priest. The Sumerians wrote the earliest surviving
prescriptions from at least 2700BC so nearly 5000 years ago. Meanwhile in china about the
same era (2000 BC) a man called shenNung wrote the first Pen T’sao or native herbal, which
contained description of 365 plant-based drugs. Stalls and shops selling medicinal goods
existed around 1900 BC in the town of sippara on the Euphrates River. However, the earliest
recorded shop dealing with sales of medicines in London was opened in 1345 (Royal
Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britian, 2014). An online pharmacy however comes with no
guarantees with regard to their identity, history and source. Since about the year 1999, a
growing number of internet pharmacies have been established worldwide. Many of these
pharmacies are similar to community pharmacies that serve consumers online, hence walk in
the door. It was found out that some customers consider this method to be more convenient
and a private method rather than travelling to the community drugstore. Internet pharmacies
are also recommended to some patients by their physicians if they are homebound. The
introduction of soma.com marked the arrival of a major pharmacy on the internet in January
1999. Many online pharmacy sites followed soon after, with drugstore.com and planetR.com
being the most notable. These three sites were widely regarded among the most credible and
reputable in the industry. Most internet pharmacy sites were initially stand-alone, full-service
online pharmacies. The industry has shifted quickly with traditional pharmacy chains
aggressively acquiring all or part of the internet start-ups or establishing their own division
for online prescription or and non-prescription sales. Wall Street awarded billion-dollar

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valuation to companies like drugstore.com at 1999, even though the companies had meagre
revenues and projected years of losses. The initial public offering price of drugstore.com was
$16, and the stock reached a high of over $70 per share in its first year. In 1999, rite aid
acquired 40% of drugstore.com. The stock price for drugstore.com hovered around $1 per
share, or less, for most of the year 2001; as of January 2002, shares were selling around $3
each. Shares of planetRx.com jumped 62% of its first day if training on the Nasqad stock
market in 1999 and settled about 26% per share. PlanetRX no longer exists as an online
pharmacy. CVS brought soma.com which is now CVS.com. The initial euphoria about
internet pharmacies is diminishing despite the fact that the numbers of sites begin to grow. A
well-known annual pharmaceutical industry report predicted that online pharmacy sales will
reach more than $20 billion by the year 2004, compared with almost $2 billion in sales in
1999. Such growth projects, however are highly speculative. The internet pharmacy industry
continues to grow as a result of customer interest in more competitive prices and greater
convenience. Estimates on the number of internet pharmacy sites ranges between 500 and
600. The proliferation of online pharmacies has generated considerable controversy, largely
due to the variability of sites and professional concerns.

Conducting transactions on the internet offers several advantages over “bricks and mortar”
thus physical pharmaceutical shops. In the past, we could only walk up to a shop to buy a
prescribed drug. Now, we can sit at the comfort of our homes and purchase the drug online
for it to be delivered to us. There are lots of benefits to purchasing medicines online. Internet
pharmacies are available 24 hours a day for people to place their orders.

2.2 Reviewed Systems.

2.2.1 1mg
1 mg is an online pharmacy that allows users send order prescription-based medicines,
protein supplements, medical devices and personal care products. It was founded in 2015.
1mg’s headquarters is located in Gurgaon, Haryana, IN 122001. In addition to letting you
order your medicines, it also helps you gather information in your medicines. It also sells you
generic medicines. Even if you do not want to not want to buy medicines from them, you
may use the app to know more about it. You can find out about the substitutes and side
effects (if any) of the drugs you are ordering. The service is operational in Delhi-NCR,
Chennai, Hyderabad, Lucknow, Agra, Indore, Bhopal and Bengaluru.

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A few salient features of 1mg are

 It lets you find substitutes for medicines. You just enter the name of the medicine and
it offers you the list of cheaper alternatives.
 You can use the app to book diagnostic tests.
 The side effects of your prescription medicines are listed on the app and the site for
about 100000 drugs.

The app has won several awards for its excellence in the field. They have apps for both
android and Ios.

Website –www.1mg.com.

2.2.2 Inayo
Inayo enables users to order medicines and other healthcare products such as over the counter
medicines, ayurvenda and herbal items. Inayo was founded in 2015. Inayo’s headquarters is
located in Mumbai, Maharashtra, IN 400072. It has raised 300.0K in 1 round. The latest
round was in Oct 2015. Inayo’s primary investor is kemark ventures. Inayo’s co-founder &
CEO, Raunak Jain, currently has an approval rating 61%. Inayo has an estimated 99
employees and estimated annual revenue 2.1M. The app promises to deliver your medicines
in just under 90 minutes. It has a healthcare app that works across web, Whatsapp and
android. With a medicine at home tagline, inayo maintains your medical history based on the
medicines ordered. It also lets you book tests.

Some noteworthy features of the app and the service are

 You can order your over the counter drugs along with the prescription medicines.
 Inayo delivers generic medicines, baby care products, personal care products and
other health products.
 You can book tests online at the center near your location. Inayo delivers the reports
to your doorstep. You have the option of receiving the reports on your email as well.
 It provides free delivery for orders above RS. 200.

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 CHAPTER THREE
3.1 METHODOLOGY.
This phase is where we give in details the plan for how the objectives mentioned in the
previous section will be achieved. This can only be done if the proper methodology is
selected. The methodology is important to make sure all project lifecycle activities are being
carried out without any shortcomings. Methodology helps the system developers to take one
step at a time towards accomplishing the full system. The agile development methodology
will be used for this project.

Agile Development Methodology.

Software development methodologies play a vital part of developing the software. There are
many methodologies which are used by the professional software development companies
nowadays. There are certain advantages and disadvantages associated with each of them. The
basic purpose of this methodology is to provide a smooth system development according to
the project requirements. Some advantages of this methodology is it has an adaptive approach
which is able to respond to the changing requirements of clients. Also, direct communication
and constant feedback from the customer representative leave no space for any guess work in
the system. Again people and interactions are emphasized rather than the process and tools.
Customers, developers and testers interact with each other.

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Agile software development is an intangible framework which is used for software projects.
Agile development methodology helps to maximize the productivity as the project is divided
into short iterations. Agile development methodology is mostly adapted method during
software implementation nowadays as it more emphasis on people. Whether you are
implementing an ERP solution, CRM tool, or any other software for your
business/Organization.

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Some of the main Characteristics of Agile development Methodology are as follows:

Frequent Delivery
As the projects in agile development methodology is divided into small iterations, they are
also called as phases/scrum of a project.

Frequent Testing:
Another best characteristic of agile method is that the software which the vendor is crafting
for your business are test frequently. This ensures the vendor is providing the tool as per your
requirements rather doing a big bang and surprises in functionality.

Collaborative approach:
Agile method is a collaborative approach where both client and vendor work together to
avoid mistakes in functionality of the tool, apart from that as we said that frequent testing
helps you with a Dream software for your business.

Apart from that agile development method is useful when you don’t have clear idea of the
requirements which means on a high level you can gather the modules and functionalities and
during implementation you can go into more details of the features, or create a new phase for
customization. There are 2 popular agile methods available – Scrum and Extreme
programming Scrum – In Scrum Agile development client priorities the requirement as per
the importance and each scrum needs to be delivered in a given timeline. If the requirements
are not completed in one scrum then it moves to next scrum.

Extreme Programming (XP) – In XP Agile development the iterations period is less than
scrum around 1 to 3 weeks. In XP the developer prioritizes the requirements as per the
importance to ensure smoothness, Iteration period is not fixed and can be increase if any new
requirements come. More focus is given on the testing part
Some of the other flavors of agile development are

 Agile Manifesto
 Crystal
 Context Driven Testing

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  Lean Development
 (Rational) Unified Process
Development.
This is the phase where we state the various tools we intend to use in our development
process. We may use tools such as HTML, PHP, CSS, SQL, JavaScript, Sublime text and
Wamp Server.

HTML
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is a set of markup symbols or codes inserted in a file
intended for display on World Wide Web browser pages. The markup tells the web browser
how to display a web page’s words and images for the user. Each individual markup code is
referred to as an element or tag. Some elements come in pairs that indicate when some
display effect is to begin and when it is to end.

PHP
PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor which formerly stood for Personal Home Page. PHP
is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is suited for web
development and can be embedded into HTML. What distinguishes PHP from something like
client-side JavaScript is that the code is executed on the server, generating HTML which is
then sent to the client. The client would receive the results of running that script but would
not know what the underlying code was.

CSS
A cascading style sheet (CSS) is a Web page derived from multiple sources with a defined
order of precedence where the definitions of any style element conflict. The CSS, level 1
recommendation from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is implemented in the
latest versions of the Netscape and Microsoft Web Browsers, specifies the possible style
sheets or statements that may determine how a given element is presented in a web page.

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JAVASCRIPT
JavaScript is a programming language that started off simply as a mechanism to add logic
and interactivity to an otherwise static Netscape browser. In the years since its introduction, it
has not only supplanted a variety of other competing languages and technologies to become
the standard for browser-based programming, but it has also expanded beyond the client
space to become a dominant language on the server side as well.

SUBLIME TEXT
Sublime text is a proprietary cross platform source code editor with a Python application
programming interface (API). It natively support many programming languages and markup
languages and functions can be added by users with plugins, typically community-built and
maintained under free-software licenses.

WAMPSERVER
Stands for “Windows, Apache, MySQL, and PHP”. WAMP is a variation of LAMP for
windows systems and is often installed as a software bundle (Apache, MYSQL, and PHP). It
is often used for web development and internal testing, but may also be used to serve live
websites.

SCHEDULE AND TIMEFRAME

This project will be conducted within the timeframe given to us by this university.

RESOURCES.
To conduct this study successfully we would have to seek references from other sources. This
university has a library full of past conducted projects similar to our study. We also have
available to us articles and journals on the internet that we believe will help us conduct this
study.

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 REFERENCES
 Gallagher, J. (2000). Issues in internet Pharmacy Practice. Annuals of
Pharmacotherapy, 1(1) p.1483
 Kamat, T. (2015). Techulator.[online] Available at
http://www.techulator.com/resources/15258-Top-5-apps-for-ordering-medicines-
online.aspx [Accessed 11 Sep 2019]
 Rouse, M. (2015). The server side. [online] Available at:
http://www.theserverside.com/definition/HTML-Hypertext-Markup-Language
[Accessed 13 Sep 2019]
 Rouse, M. (2018). The server side. [online] Available at:
http://www.theserverside.com/definition/JavaScript [Accessed 13 Sep 2019]
 Rouse, M. (2018). The server side. [online] Available at:
http://www.theserverside.com/definition/CSS [Accessed 13 Sep 2019]
 Owler.com (2015). Owler’s official website [online] Available at:
https://www.owler.com/company/1mg [Accessed 12 Sep 2019]
 Crawford , S. (2003). Issues of Accra, Quality, cost and regulation, volume 27, pp.57
& 58.
 Yang, Z (2001). Taking the pulse of internet Pharmacies. Marketing Health Services,
pp.5-6
 Globalteckz.com (2013). Globaltecks official website [online] Available at:
http://blogs.globalteckz.com/characteristics-of-agile-methodology-in-software-
development/ [Accessed 18 Sep 2019]

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