To digitise Africa's neighbourhood pharmacies and chemists, a Nigerian startup using procurement innovations, inventory financing solutions, and pharmacy operations/patient management solutions to improve access to effective and affordable medicines has raised a pre-seed capital of $1Million.
Remedial Health announced the development via a post on Medium. The group also said it is participating in the winter 2022 cohort of Silicon Valley's Y Combinator accelerator. Y Combinator provides seed capital for startups.
The organisation said, "...these funds, as well as our participation in Y Combinator, will accelerate the fruition" of its goal and mission, which is building "a tech-enabled, pharmacy-centred healthcare network across the continent [Africa]."
"We are not only making it easier for neighbourhood pharmacies and PPMVs (patent and proprietary medicine vendors) to access affordable and authentic medicines from leading manufacturers. We are also rolling out our PMR (patient medical records) platform that will make them more efficient and profitable and give them access to consolidated data on customers to support the delivery of better healthcare services across the continent," it added.
The group said that PPMVs are responsible for 80% of the continent's pharmaceutical industry, currently estimated at $45 billion and projected to reach $70 billion by 2030; hence the need to address the bottlenecks in the supply chain.
"These guys are basically businesses without a trained pharmacist that sell pharmaceutical products on a retail basis for-profit, and they provide the main source of medicines for many common illnesses. However, they have to navigate an opaque supply chain and a fragmented marketplace to access the stock they need for their stores, which can make them very unprofitable. This also means manufacturers have limited visibility into their performance, leading to inefficient decision making on forecasting, production and distribution," it said.
"We have created a digital procurement platform that makes it possible for store owners to source all the medicines, consumables and small medical devices for their practice via a mobile app or mobile responsive web store at open-air medicine market prices and have them delivered within 24 hours. All products are vetted before distribution to verify their authenticity."
The statement also said the group's patented Patient Medication Records and Inventory Control, PMR software (Remedial Rx), is designed to improve healthcare service delivery across the continent.
"With our platform, it will be easier to make informed decisions on which products are best suited to a customer based on their medical history. It will also enable us to provide consolidated, real-time data on market behaviour to manufacturers for increased profitability and better decision-making across the value chain."
Remedial Health pledged to improve healthcare delivery through innovation, especially in connecting pharmacies and PPMVs to manufacturers for effectiveness and accuracy in decision making across the industry value chain.
