Communex

Inspiration

We have a friend who is currently studying pharmacy, and with his work experience, he shared about some of the challenges pharmacists face, which could lead to burnout. Hearing these stories gave us a better insider perspective into the stresses that pharmacists face. On seeing HackitRx Singapore 2025’s theme, we thought that it would be a good opportunity for us to brainstorm solutions to try alleviating the stresses among pharmacists, hence reducing burnout rates.

What it does

Implements a flagging system for drug prescriptions that is visible to the pharmacy. When physicians issue a prescription, the system automatically flags deviations, such as excessive dosage, contraindications, or a change to the usual medication. The physician will be prompted to submit a justification for such deviations, which are also visible to the pharmacy. This saves time and reduces pressure on pharmacists, who currently have to review every part of the prescription to spot potential errors.

How we built it

As a prototype was required, we decided to use low/no-code development platforms to create a working model. Initially, we attempted to use Cogniss, the platform recommended to us, but we ran into some difficulty navigating the platform. Additionally, Cogniss is only able to run on a mobile app, and we wanted our idea to run on web apps as well. Thus, we switched over to Bubble, a more intuitive app development platform, to draft out our prototype. We used a template given by the platform and edited it accordingly to our needs, such as creating relevant examples for our datatype and changing the formatting of the webpage.

Challenges we ran into

With limited experience in creating an app, we struggled to navigate the user interface of the software to create the app. As such, we spent quite some time interacting with the software, which we could have spent more productively ideating solutions to our problem.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For a team with little experience in coding, we were proud of how far we managed to get from the ideation phase to the creation phase. Through this process, we managed to play to our strengths and also learn more about the workplace challenges that pharmacists face.

What we learned

Many accumulating factors lead to the burnout of pharmacists. We learnt to dig deeper into the problem that we focused on, the inefficiency in dispensing due to errors in prescriptions, which led us to find one of the root causes of our problem.

What's next for Communex

We can incorporate more data into our system regarding the interactions between the different drugs so that the flagging out in our app will be more accurate, hence further improving efficiency. With more time to conduct surveys and gather feedback, we can implement new features to detect more types of prescription errors. Additionally, we can also link Communex to the pharmacy’s inventory management system, such that the system can start to become an all-in-one application for the pharmacy.