Regulators are seeking more transparency and control when it comes to areas of business and commerce that impact the masses — in today’s day and age.

Public health is one of those areas, and governments are demanding more information on how and what drugs their residents use.

In the Phillippines, the country’s 105 million people are served by 15,000 registered pharmacies — all of whom keep paper records of the prescriptions that they fill.

“But paper records are of no use to anyone — neither the pharmacies nor the regulators” exclaimed mClinica CEO Farouk Meralli in an exclusive interview with Tech Wire Asia.

Recently, the Philippines adopted a law requiring all pharmacists to use a new platform called the Electronic Drug Safety System (eDSS), developed by mClinica.

Pharmacists will use their smartphones to photograph each prescription they fill and upload it to the eDSS, which uses artificial intelligence to digitize the prescription and send the data to a cloud-based database, enabling real-time public health insights. Nearly 300 million prescriptions will be digitized every year.

Read more on Techwire Asia.