Projecting the Community Pharmacy into Home Health Care: An IS Perspective

Abstract

Community pharmacies deliver accessible and personalized health care to populations worldwide. Provision of medicine therapy is central to this business but the continuous interactions with clients in their homes is problematic. This paper models an ecosystem of wellness for community pharmacies and presents five generations of smart pharmaceutical care systems (SPCS) for home interventions. Our project follows the design science research paradigm and is supported in an extensive review of 56 recent information systems papers. Two key challenges of Health 5.0 are addressed: digital medication management and sustainable medicine use. SPCS reveal potential to change the business model of community pharmacies. However, spanning the pharmacy boundaries with digital technologies requires (1) socio-technical strategies to differentiate their offer, (2) technologies tailored to the needs of each client, (3) collective intelligence production in medicine supply chains, and (4) humanized telecare.