Doctor-patient online interaction brought to a new level
Challenge
Dowa is a reputable pharmacy eCommerce website in Kuwait. It was established in 2011. The previous website was developed in aspdotnetstorefront. When new requirements for doctor-patient communication appeared, the site was unable to support them. To implement new features, Comelite IT Solutions has recently revamped the website.
A list of requirements spanned over 200 bullet points, but the most important were:
- ability to support OTC (On-The-Counter) drugs
- ability to define different users and roles, such as doctors, patients and agents
- ability to issue prescriptions
- ability to convert the prescriptions into orders
- ability to get online consultation or chat with the doctors
- support Kuwait's local payment gateway for online transactions (Knet)
- get Android and iOS apps
Solution
To meet the requirements, Comelite IT Solutions had to develop several client-specific plugins and customize the core. For instance, prescriptions could not be added with plugins, but features such as payment gateway or live chat were easily implemented with plugins.
Those plugins include:
- live chat
- commission manager
- vendor rating
- web API
- Knet payment gateway
- HTML widget
Two new native apps were also developed.
Project, along the way
Many things were customly developed for this project. For example, the apps were built from scratch; first commercial SignalR based live chat plugin for nopcommerce was done. Also, rewriting the core to support prescriptions was one of the hardest tasks due to the amount of work involved.
“While there are always issues with any project, we were always confident with nopCommerce. It was a great experience building such a big store. We were pleased to use NopCommerce for the task as it never failed us, allowed for easy expansion and most importantly, offered a robust platform to build on,” - said David Niki, Operations Manager at Comelite IT Solutions.
