In India, ecommerce gives a chance for cheaper generic medicines to get discovered

If you live in India, you might remember Satyamev Jayate, a reality TV series from a few years back about social issues plaguing the country. In one of the episodes, “Does Healthcare Need Healing?”, a panel of doctors concluded that generic medicines are just as effective as branded drugs – and yet doctors rarely prescribe them and most patients are not aware that these cheaper alternatives exist.

This sowed a seed in the minds of Pankaj Gupta and his wife Madhu, who had been watching the series remotely while working for a tech firm in New York. They quickly launched MeraMedicare, a site that allows users to search for generic alternatives to brand-name medicines and buy them from the nearest chemist. It also supports reverse bidding of medicines from multiple pharmacies in the vicinity to help users get medicines at the best price. The goal is to bring awareness and transparency into the system, and help users save on medical costs.

When a patient uploads a picture of their prescription, MeraMedicare’s tech tool notifies the nearest partnered pharmacies. The pharmacies reply with suitable alternatives, best quotations, discounts, and a delivery time. After receiving multiple quotes, the user can make a choice based on delivery time, discount, or pharmacy ratings. Deliveries are made within a day.

Right now, only one-fourth of MeraMedicare’s users opt for generic medications over name brands.

MeraMedicare also helps patients set reminders for their medicines, and save bills and prescriptions.

Cracking a tough nut

MeraMedicare founders Pankaj and Madhu Gupta

Pankaj says that in a sensitive segment like healthcare, earning credibility is tough. In India, many patients still don’t believe that medicines can be sold online and delivered to one’s home without compromising on the quality.

MeraMedicare claims that it checks a pharmacy’s drug license, past inspection reports, and other information before adding it to the seller board. It also claims that it does not accept orders for prescriptions that don’t look genuine.

To resolve credibility issues, the startup has also changed its pitch and started focusing on delivery from nearby chemists.

“The pitch of the product is a very crucial element. People don’t want to work with any system that creates any kind of doubt about the services or quality. Involving local chemists from the vicinity was a critical element while starting out,” says Pankaj.

The other challenge was to finalize the right features and value propositions. The founder wanted to create the best solution providing all the value propositions from the beginning.

“We spent many months in creating features like automatic updates on social media about customer’s savings and points accumulation. However when we went live, we realized that all those features don’t attract customers,” says Pankaj. “We spent another month or two to de-feature the system. We learned the definition and importance of minimum viable product (MVP) after facing initial failure, rejections, and wastage of time and money,” he says.

Saving on human resources

Beating heavily-funded players