Josep Villanueva

Patricia Montalvo

Dassin Ngopsie

IBM Coach

Victoria Coello

Team

Student Service Design Challenge

Challenge

Year

2021

A digital platform that enhances the pharmacy-consumer experience and facilitates the correct and appropriate return of medicines to the collection point.

Repill

The pharmaceutical industry has increased the most in the past years with medicines being essential for humans, in charge of curing diseases by killing or stopping the advance of invading germs, such as bacteria and viruses. Although medicines and their benefits, including the economic one, are highly appreciated, there is a problem that should not be overlooked: the large amounts of pharmaceutical waste generated each year worldwide.

Pharmaceutical waste refers to all medicines that are unused, misused, spoiled, expired or not needed any longer. Half of the medicines are prescribed and sold in an improper way globally, also half of the patients do not comply with the indications of how to take them, creating a great waste of resources and misuse of medications which affects directly on human health.

Recent research shows that up to 42% of the Spanish citizens ensure that they still keep the

boxes with the prescribed date expired and 12% throw them away in undesirable places.

Currently, the loop of these highly valued goods is not properly closed and tons of medicines are wasted every year. Now more than ever because of the COVID crisis as well as the shortage of medicines which keeps increasing each year in Spain, we consider it necessary to face this problem and close the loop.

This problem affects nature, animals and us as human beings, especially when medicines are not disposed appropriately.

These have been found in many parts of the environment, from the oceans and rivers, drinking water and even to different surfaces above and underground. In Spain, a study by the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) gave an alert about this, after finding disturbing amounts of pharmaceutical waste all along the Ebro river. Among the drugs found, among those with the highest concentration we could find cholesterol regulators such as clofibric acid, to the pain reliever naproxen or even the antiepileptic carbamazepine.

As a result, we are unconsciously medicating the environment. This causes an important impact in all the living ecosystems leading to numerous serious consequences, such as multi-resistant bacteria, which do not respond to antibiotics.

In Spain more than 35,000 people die each year as a result of multi-resistant bacteria, which is a serious health threat, especially in Spain considering it used to be the first country in the world in consumption of antibiotics and despite its efforts to lower this rate, it is still above the European average.

If you add to this problem, the misuse of medicines mentioned above, the wasted resources and the logistics of the pharmaceutical industry it’s hard to believe how this problem seems to be overlooked and barely no one is acting against it.

Background & Context

Who is affected by this problem?

All Projects

The team

The user

Our audience is extremely broad, since all human beings need drugs, so we do not have a specific segmentation. The problem is that all human beings have the need to feel safe and feel protected, so it is a standard that in the vast majority of houses there exists a certain type of medicine, this is in case they have pain and are in need of a quick solution and that’s where self-medication begins.

We find another user that will be beneficiated by oue system which is Pharmacies.

Our objective

The objective of our proposal it’s to increase awareness of this problem and improve the communication between the different stakeholders in order to upgrade the user's experience and reduce the environmental impact of pharmaceutical waste.

Once we Empathize & Discover we have put the opportunities detected on the table, and we begin to conceptualize and analyze them in depth. With the user journey map developed in phase two in mind, we decided to map out an Experience Flow Map, which shows opportunities, gain points, pain points and the interaction between stakeholders.

Ideate & Develop

We began by recovering all the insights developed through the previous phases. From those insights we conducted a brainstorming on how we could reduce the pharmaceutical waste generated. The top three ideas generated were further explored through visual tools and rapid prototypes. After an exhaustive ideation process we arrived at the conceptualization of a service which helps close the loop and engage the user through an improved experience.

Society is changing by leaps and bounds and that is why we have done an exhaustive user study to see how they feel about it.

Below are the most important insights that will lead to the final REPILL proposal:

Repill's Proposal

Evaluating different paths to follow, we came to the conclusion that designing a service around a mobile application will help us to reach our user easily (20-30s with little free time) as well as digitize this industry to enrich the user-pharmacy experience and to be able to raise user awareness to reduce pharmaceutical waste contamination.

We do not seek to suppress these moments of visit to the pharmacy so appreciated by our user, but to improve them, make them more efficient, add more interaction and of course encourage the user to return what has expired at home, as well as to avoid overconsumption of medicines through carefully designed functionalities.

This will be the key to our reverse logistics service.

The mobile application is a mix of user-valued and implicit functionalities to promote the reverse logistics of medicines.

— Buy medication online

— Get the medication delivered and the pharmaceutical waste recovered

— Calendar with pills intake and expiry reminders.

— Orders history (with alerts in case of buying a medicine you already have at your home).

— Touchpoint with pharmacy and experts.

— Medicines tracker and information.

— Scan medicines and prescriptions to digitize . process.

— Rewards for waste recovered.

Functionalities

How might we

The “How Might We” method creates an atmosphere for innovative solutions by reframing known challenges that surround your product, service or initiative.

So we did the method to ask us, how might we do the opportunities that we found out during our investigation, and we evaluated from more important to solve to also important but not that urgent, so after that decision, we started the ideation and develop phase.

REPILL

A digital platform that enhances the pharmacy-consumer experience and facilitates the correct and appropriate return of medicines to the collection point.

With REPILL, we not only aim to reduce the huge environmental impact produced by the pharmaceutical industry through a functional, easy and efficient service to return medicines and give them a second life, but we also want to raise awareness among the population that medicines save lives and should not be wasted.

REPILL redefines the boundaries of sustainability and the society we live in, which now more than ever values health and wellness and encourages a love of caring for the planet.

This is the beginning of a new way of thinking and acting. REPILL.