Iot Enabled Smart Pharmacy Management System For Real-Time Drug Inventory Monitoring

Abstract

Healthcare services have experienced rapid growth in recent years, which has led to an increase in complexity for the pharmaceutical inventory management of healthcare services. There are many challenges in maintaining accurate stock of drugs, checking the expiry dates of drugs, and ensuring the availability of drugs on time. Most of the existing systems for managing pharmacies rely on manual data entry and on occasional verification of inventory. This results in many problems such as inaccuracy in inventory records, wastage of medicines, delayed replenishment, and ineffectiveness of resources. In order to address these challenges, an IoT-based smart system for the management of pharmacies is proposed in this paper for the real-time monitoring of the inventory of drugs and intelligent management of stock. This framework utilizes the sensors of IoT, RFID and barcode technologies, and the intelligent analytics in a cloud-based platform for the management of real-time information of drugs that are in the inventory of the pharmacy and for monitoring of storage conditions of drugs. Information can be acquired from the various units of the inventory of pharmacy on a real-time basis. This information is sent to the cloud platform through various communication protocols of IoT after processing. Various alerts and notifications are generated automatically through the automated processing and decision-making system in the cloud platform. This framework also utilizes machine learning technique for the demand forecasting of the medicines by analyzing the past consumption patterns of the medicines. The stock can be predicted on time by this technique, which can result in avoidance of overstocking and shortage of medicines. The framework can also monitor the inventory on time, and can minimize human intervention in the inventory of pharmacy, thus resulting in increased efficiency of the operations of pharmacy. Performance of the framework can be evaluated using various parameters such as accuracy of detection of inventory, response time, accuracy of prediction of stock, and reduction in wastage of medicines. This system provides a scalable and intelligent solution for the modern pharmacy management by enabling monitoring of inventory on automated basis, and predictive management of stock, and effective management of health care supply chain.