Secure Online Pharmacy Billing with Prescription Upload and Encrypted Invoice Management

Abstract

The rapid growth of online healthcare services has accelerated the digital transformation of pharmacy billing and prescription management systems. Modern online pharmacies process large volumes of sensitive medical prescriptions, patient records, and financial invoices, making secure data management and controlled access essential. Ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of healthcare information is critical for maintaining patient trust and meeting regulatory requirements. However, many conventional pharmacy billing systems still rely on manual procedures or partially digital platforms where prescriptions and invoices are stored without adequate security. These systems often lack role-based access control, encrypted file storage, centralised data management, and secure authentication, making them vulnerable to unauthorised access, data tampering, billing delays, and human errors. To overcome these limitations, the proposed secure web-based pharmacy billing system integrates modern web technologies with cryptographic security techniques. The system is developed using the Flask framework to manage request routing, session handling, and role-based authorisation. Tiny Database (TinyDB) is used to store user information, product records, prescriptions, invoices, orders, and encrypted file metadata in JSON format. Sensitive documents, including prescriptions and invoices, are secured using Alleged Rivest Cipher (ARC2) encryption in Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) mode, while user passwords are protected using Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-256) hashing. The proposed system enhances data security, minimizes manual effort, improves operational reliability, and provides secure, efficient, and role-based pharmacy billing and document management.