Access to healthcare shouldn't be rocket science and our platform is out to prove it

The Pill Shop founders (PHOTO: FILE)

NAIROBI, KENYA: One of the basic human needs is access to affordable and professional health care.

But in many developing countries, Kenya included, access to and affordability of this crucial service is a challenge.

Tanvi Bharat Shah, 29, and her husband, Nirav Sudhir Shah, discovered this first hand when Nirav fell sick in 2012.

Despite the fact that Tanvi was working as a pharmacist at a well-known hospital, the couple struggled to get a good referral for a specialist doctor to handle her husband’s ulcers.

It was then that Tanvi got the idea to create an online platform with the details of doctors, pharmacies and insurance companies in Kenya.

It took her two years to get her company, The Pill Shop, off the ground. And this year, the idea got Tanvi and her husband an investment of Sh5 million on the TV show, KCB Lions’ Den.

Tanvi takes Hustle through the journey, from dream to reality.

What exactly is The Pill Shop?

The Pill Shop is an online platform that links patients to doctors, clinics, pharmacies and insurance companies. What we are doing is building a database of all registered medical practitioners and services, and making them accessible to would-be patients for free.

This isn’t a first in Kenya ...

No, it’s not. There are a few sites that have been running with a similar outlook, but I believe the challenge most of these faced was a lack of visibility. With more and more Kenyans being connected online, our aim is for The Pill Shop to be a household name.

If someone needs to find a doctor or book an appointment with a doctor or use any medical service, we want them to think of The Pill Shop first.

Take us through how the system works.

If someone is looking for a doctor, they’ll log onto the site and if they are a first time user, they’ll register, which takes about three minutes or less.

They can then search for a doctor by name, proximity or speciality. Once they find a doctor they want, they’re given the doctor’s calendar, which enables them to pick a date and time. This information is relayed to the doctor, who then confirms the appointment.

Once they see the doctor, the doctor can prescribe medication using the same portal and save it as a PDF, which is then sent to a pharmacy of the patient’s choice. The doctor can also add notes on diagnosis on the patient’s account, which only the patient and doctor can see.

How have you got doctors and patients to register on the platform?

We used social media mainly for the patients, but it didn’t seem to work with doctors.

We realised that we had to go door-to-door and explain to them in person what our site was about and why it was beneficial for them to be a part of it. For starters, it draws patients directly to them.

The other big selling point for doctors is that we are offering them a one-stop shop to book appointments, write prescriptions and save patients’ files. The system works for walk-in patients as well.

What was your start-up capital?

Between the website and getting our business plan professionally done, we spent about Sh15 million. It was a substantial amount, but we raised it between the original five shareholders of the company – Amit Shah, Krushil Haria, Sanjeev Cheruvari, my husband Nirav and myself.

How do you plan to make back this money and turn a profit?

We’ll bill the doctors. For every patient who books an appointment and shows up to see the doctor, we charge Sh50.

That doesn’t sound like much, but when you do the math, it adds up.

There are 5,700 registered doctors in Kenya. Our aim at the end of the first year is to register 1,000 of them to our site. If each of these doctors sees 10 patients a day at Sh50 per patient, that’s Sh500,000 a day and Sh182 million for the year.

In year two, we’re looking at Sh235 million and then Sh350 million in year three because we would have added pharmacies to our site and we’ll bill them a percentage per prescription through our platform.

Do you think these projections are what hooked the investors in the Den?

I believe that was one of the factors, yes. But also, Olive Gachara, the lion who invested in us, is from a family of doctors. She took great interest in a product that offers convenience for both medical practitioners and patients.

She drove a hard bargain at 20 per cent equity in exchange for her Sh5 million, but it was worth it to us, so we said yes.

What was the toughest sell in the Den?

One of the lions, Myke Rabar, pointed out that if a patient has a negative experience with a doctor, they’re likely to blame the site, not the doctor.

In the same way that if you get a cab from a cab company, it’s not the cab driver you’ll blame in case of any problem, but the company.

We have, however, taken steps to address this concern by asking patients to review doctors after their visits. We ask them to rate a doctor on a scale of one to five, with one being the lowest.

When other patients are searching for doctors on the site, they can use the star review to guide them.

We have also signed a non-liability clause with the doctors we register.

What’s the current number of doctors and patients on your site?

We went live in September. Right now, we have 85 doctors and 200 patients. The site is under beta testing, so we’re not charging at the moment, but if we were, we would have made an approximate Sh2.25 million by the end of December.

What’s the vision for your company?

We want to revolutionise how the medical industry works in Kenya, particularly the ease of finding doctors, booking appointments and getting the correct prescriptions and drugs at the most affordable rates for each patient.

Medical treatment shouldn’t be a privilege, linking the correct doctor to treat the correct ailment shouldn’t be rocket science. We want to be the platform that provides all that – not just in Kenya, but across Africa.