UX and UI design for the medicine verification application

Context

Eirwego is a software company serving the healthcare sector. Its first product, PharmaliZr, will make it possible to verify medicine packs by scanning the datamatrix codes printed on them.

It will play an active part in the fight against falsified medicines in Europe. This is an emerging market for traffickers, and it costs France more than 1 billion euros in lost revenue, for a European total of 10.5 billion euros — every year.

The application must obtain the certification it needs before it can be offered to pharmacists in laboratories, in PUIs (pharmacie à usage interne, a hospital’s internal-use pharmacy) and in community pharmacies.

The serialisation application will have to be available in several versions:

• On-Premise (installed locally, on the customer’s own servers),
• SaaS (accessible over the internet),
• and through a REST API, to meet the white-label needs of software vendors already established in the pharmaceutical industry who sell their solutions to the pharmaceutical laboratories that manufacture medicines, to PUIs and to pharmacy management systems (LGO, logiciel de gestion d’officine)

What is at stake

For Eirwego, what is at stake is anchoring its model through the co-design of software solutions that are within reach of as many people as possible, both financially and technologically.

The company wants to showcase its command of high-technology software engineering on the web by creating software solutions that are scalable and high-performing (scalability).

Objectives

• Nothing to install on the workstation when the customer is using a PC (no thick client).
• The software must be accessible from any computer or smartphone that has internet access and a web browser.
  – a PC, whatever its operating system: Windows, MacOS or Linux,
  – an Android or iOS smartphone.
• the computer or the smartphone must have internet access, have a browser to reach the web and be connected to a reader, or be fitted with a datamatrix barcode reader.
• The solution must have a modern interface centred on users’ needs.
• The solution must be built with modern technologies
• The way of working will have to be agile and deliver a solution within 2 months that meets the bar of a minimum viable product (MVP / Minimum Viable Product)
• Co-building the tool with the business teams, namely pharmacists and pharmacy technicians,

Results

The solution shipped to plan, which allowed Eirwego to become a pioneer in medicine serialisation, certified by France MVO, the French medicines verification organisation.

• Co-design workshops with pharmacists, the end users, to define the journeys (UX) from their working environment (PUIs and community pharmacies)
• Design of the web-accessible interfaces (UI) for medicine serialisation.
• The use of open source technologies: a front end built with the React JavaScript library, and a backend built with the Symfony PHP framework
• An agile SCRUM working framework put in place
• Continuous deployment put in place