Dial-A-Pill

Johannes Mangane’s app PillDrop aims to get medication to rural patients quickly and cheaply.

- Mziwakhe Hlangani

As a child, he watched as the elderly and the sick who lived in his town in a remote corner of Mpumalanga travelled to distant clinics and hospitals where they queued for hours to collect their medicines. His dad, Johannes, was one of them, spending R40 and travelling 30 km every time he needed to collect his blood pressure medication.

Now that tedious and often costly journey could soon be something of the past thanks to an ingenious invention by a 28-year-old Mpumalanga pharmacist whose plan it is to change the lives of thousands of South Africans.

Johannes Mangane has created a system he hopes will deliver medicine directly to people’s doorsteps – even in the remotest parts of South Africa.

His invention, an app called PillDrop, will be available on all types of smartphones and works in much the same way that taxi service Uber does. A driver registered on the app will pick up a patient’s medication and deliver it for a fee that’s likely to be substantially less than the amount people spend on transport to collect their pills.

“A patient logs a call on the app to say they want a refill of their prescription from the clinic. The app looks for registered drivers to see who’s close to that clinic and alerts them to the request,” Johannes explains.

“Once the driver accepts the pick-up the app sends a message to the facility to tell them a certain person will pick up the script on behalf of the patient. Once the script has been collected, it gives the patient an estimated time of when the medication will be delivered by the PillDropper, as the driver is called.”