| Medication management is a complex and expensive multistage process that covers the prescribing and ordering, order communication, dispensing, administering, and monitoring and use of prescription medications. While challenges in medication management are ubiquitous across all settings, they can be particularly exacerbated in a free clinic that serves a medically vulnerable population. These patients suffer from financial constraints, poor health literacy, multiple chronic conditions, and medication non-adherence. Clinical pharmacists play an integral role in the provision of healthcare services to these patients and could benefit from the use of medication management information technology (MMIT) to provide efficiencies in the tracking, provision, and use of medications. While MMITs exist, they are not designed to support the unique needs of pharmacists in these settings.;To address challenges related to medication management in this setting, and the inability of existing technologies to alleviate them, we developed a system for Prescription Management And General Inventory Control, or RxMAGIC, in collaboration with the Birmingham Free Clinic (BFC) in Pittsburgh, PA. RxMAGIC is an interoperable, web-based dispensary management information system designed to streamline the dispensing process and improve inventory control in a free clinic dispensary. This research describes the process employed to create, deploy, and evaluate RxMAGIC in the BFC. We used a range of evaluation studies and methods to understand challenging aspects of the pharmaceutical workflow, design a system that alleviates those challenges, and evaluate it to ensure that it does.;We assert that this research is significant in several ways. First, we developed a medication management tool for free clinic dispensaries that pharmacists in this setting do not currently have. Second, we demonstrated the importance of various levels of evaluation throughout the system development process to ensure successful adoption. Third, we utilized health data standards to achieve functional and semantic interoperability with an electronic health record. Lastly, RxMAGIC is freely available and amenable to customization, which makes it an attractive solution for low-resource settings. |
