2012 Volume 48 Issue 5 Pages 255-265
Patient-pharmacist telecommunication systems using a mail function of a mobile phone have been in practical use for a dispensing pharmacy to support outpatient medication. However, in the conventional systems, low usability and interactivity of the system has become key problems of the compliance continuation. In this paper, a user-interface is proposed for a patient-pharmacist interactive telecommunication system. By using the user-interface, patients can easily create medication reports and check pharmacist's response messages, even if they are pediatric patients. The pharmacist can also quickly make responses to the patients while working at the dispensing pharmacy. An experimental system was also developed for the user-interface and its benefit was investigated through a 2-month field trial on thirty-five pediatric outpatients with their parents, and four pharmacists in a dispensing pharmacy. From the quantitative data of operating time, response time, and questionnaire evaluation, it confirmed that the proposed user interface was useful for continuation of compliance. However, for long-term medication outpatients, there was a low evaluation for both usability and usefulness. For this reason, for the long-term medication outpatients, it turned out that a remake of the service and function demands, a reexamination of the system requirements, and finally a redesign of the user interface should be required.
