ElCharis Pharmacy

The problem

Pharmacy retail in Nigeria runs on WhatsApp, paper, and goodwill. ElCharis was no exception. Orders came in over WhatsApp, were typed into a desktop POS, paid for at a counter or by transfer, dispensed by a pharmacist, then delivered or collected. The only system that knew all four steps had happened was the pharmacist’s memory. HMO claims, the highest-value channel, lived in a separate ledger and got reconciled monthly, sometimes quarterly, against statements from seven different insurers.

The pharmacy wanted to grow online without growing the chaos. The constraint was real: any system that asked customers to learn a new ordering surface would lose them. The system had to meet them on WhatsApp, where they already were, and quietly hold the operations together behind that.

Before the platform

HMO reconciliation was a quarterly all-hands ordeal. Orders were tracked in memory and paper, prescription images were scattered across phones and WhatsApp threads, and claims for seven insurers had to be matched to statements by hand.

What I built

Three principles drove every other decision. Meet customers where they are: the ordering surface stays on WhatsApp, and the Care app is what staff use. Compliance is a feature, not paperwork: PCN-registered pharmacy workflow and NDPR-compliant data handling are baked into the schema and retention policy. Split surface area: the marketing site and Care app are separate deployments with different risk profiles and cadences.

• Two deployed apps. elcharispharmacy.com for marketing, care.elcharispharmacy.com for the transactional Care platform.
• WhatsApp intake. Orders, prescription images, and HMO authorizations come in as messages, parsed into structured intents through the WhatsApp Cloud API, queued, and surfaced to the pharmacist as a workable inbox.
• Prescription image pipeline. Images stored on Cloudflare R2, tagged to a customer record, surfaced to the pharmacist with redaction controls and a chain-of-custody trail.
• HMO claim processing. Integration across seven insurers (Hygeia, AXA Mansard, Reliance, Leadway, Avon, Clearline, Total Health Trust); claim raise, status tracking, and a weekly reconciliation surface.
• Payments. Paystack-backed card, bank transfer, and HMO co-pay. One checkout, three local payment methods, zero customer-side wallet.
• Same-day dispatch. Order → fulfilment → handover modelled as a tracked sequence, not three loose tasks.

Target outcome

The rebuild is targeting the outcome validated in the earlier deployment: WhatsApp intake as the dominant order channel, HMO reconciliation run weekly instead of quarterly, and the pharmacist’s clinical hours freed from ledger work. The platform is being engineered to stay stable through the power and connectivity events common in the operating environment.

Specific verified order volume, reconciliation time, and uptime will be added once the rebuild is in production.

Stack

Next improvements

• Admin-first iteration. The operations surface ships before the customer-facing demo, so the pharmacist’s workflow is solid before intake scales.
• Tighter HMO surface. Sharper exception handling and statement-format parsing for the seven insurer partners.
• Dispatch view. A dedicated handover view for same-day couriers and pickup coordination.