The rapid expansion of digital services has transformed how people access food, transport, and financial systems, yet access to medicines in many local settings remains shaped by fragmented and largely informal practices. Orders are often handled through social media messages, manual follow-ups, and loosely coordinated delivery arrangements. While these approaches offer a degree of convenience, they rarely provide reliable information about medicine availability, consistent communication between stakeholders, or transparent delivery updates. In healthcare-related transactions, these gaps are especially significant because delays and uncertainty affect not only service quality, but also practical access to essential treatment.
Within Iligan City, this condition points to a deeper coordination problem. The challenge is not simply the lack of an online ordering interface, but the absence of a unified digital environment capable of connecting customers, pharmacies, riders, and administrators in a structured way. Customers need clearer access to available medicines and more dependable visibility into order progress. Pharmacies require a system through which inventory, prescriptions, and order fulfillment can be managed more coherently. Riders need location-aware tools that reduce uncertainty during dispatch and delivery. When these functions remain disconnected, inefficiency becomes a systemic issue rather than an isolated inconvenience.
This project emerges from the view that medicine accessibility should be examined as both a technological and social concern. A coordinated digital platform has the potential to support patients who face mobility constraints, time limitations, or difficulty accessing nearby pharmacies through conventional means. At the same time, it may broaden the participation of smaller pharmacies in a more connected service ecosystem. The significance of the work therefore lies not only in building a software artifact, but in exploring how digital infrastructure can reshape local pharmaceutical access through coordination, visibility, and operational continuity.
PharmaGo is best understood in this context as a research-driven system for multi-pharmacy medicine ordering and delivery. Rather than presenting the platform merely as a commercial application, the project frames it as an applied model for integrating medicine discovery, prescription-aware transactions, order management, rider assignment, and real-time delivery monitoring within a single service architecture. The repository represents that model as a working implementation of a broader inquiry into how localized e-pharmacy systems can be designed to address fragmentation in medicine distribution.
The central contribution of PharmaGo lies in its treatment of medicine delivery as a multi-actor coordination problem. Customers, pharmacy administrators, riders, and platform administrators do not operate independently; each role depends on timely, accurate, and shared information. The system therefore organizes interaction around a common workflow in which medicines can be browsed, prescriptions reviewed where necessary, payments selected, orders fulfilled, deliveries dispatched, and completion statuses communicated across the platform. This transforms what is often a loosely managed sequence of manual exchanges into a more formalized and observable process.
At a conceptual level, the architecture advances a centralized yet role-sensitive design. It does not simply digitize existing informal routines; it restructures them into a coherent framework where service visibility, accountability, and information flow are embedded into the design itself. In doing so, PharmaGo contributes to ongoing discussions in digital health systems regarding how platform architecture can support accessibility while remaining responsive to the operational realities of local service providers.
The implementation reflects this coordination objective through a layered full-stack architecture. Core business logic and service orchestration are handled through Python and Django, with Django REST Framework supporting the exchange of structured application data across clients. PostgreSQL serves as the persistent relational store for users, medicines, pharmacies, prescriptions, carts, orders, and delivery records, enabling consistency across tightly linked workflows. Redis supports caching and time-sensitive coordination, while Django Channels, Daphne, and channels-redis enable WebSocket-based real-time communication for status updates and other live interactions.
The client layer is divided according to stakeholder needs while remaining architecturally consistent. React is used for the web-based pharmacy and administrative interfaces, where inventory visibility, order handling, and oversight functions are most prominent. React Native with Expo is used for the customer and rider mobile applications, enabling a mobile-first workflow for medicine browsing, order placement, route navigation, and delivery confirmation. Supporting technologies such as TypeScript, React Router, Axios, Tailwind CSS, Stripe, Cloudinary, and Google Maps are integrated where appropriate to strengthen usability, media handling, payment support, and geospatial coordination. Docker further reinforces the reproducibility of the system by providing a stable deployment and development environment for the broader application stack.
Taken together, PharmaGo represents more than a codebase for a delivery platform. It functions as a practical research model for examining how digital systems can support medicine accessibility in an emerging urban context. By combining inventory management, prescription-aware ordering, real-time communication, cross-platform client design, and coordinated delivery workflows, the project offers a structured basis for understanding how e-pharmacy platforms may be designed to reduce fragmentation and improve service responsiveness. In this sense, the repository documents not only an implementation, but a wider exploration of digital coordination in community-level healthcare service delivery.
The research evaluation of PharmaGo further suggests that the system was received positively across its intended user groups. Using the System Usability Scale (SUS), the study reported above-average overall scores for the customer, rider, and pharmacy applications, with mean SUS results of 51.0, 53.0, and 53.0, respectively. In the original evaluation narrative, these findings were accompanied by strongly acceptable usability ratings across respondent groups, indicating that the platform was regarded as generally usable, understandable, and operationally coherent within the context of the study.
The academic development of PharmaGo has also received institutional and conference-level recognition. The study was recognized as SMCII Best Research, SMCII Best Paper Presentation, and SMCII Best Oral Presentation, and it also received a Special Citation during the RVM 3rd National Research Congress. These distinctions are included not as promotional claims, but as indicators that the project has undergone scholarly presentation and evaluation within academic research settings.