Singapore, Singapore – December 11th, 2018 – Singapore’s mClinica has vaulted on the back of blazing growth to become the largest pharmacy data technology player in Southeast Asia reaching 150 million unique patients every month. mClinica’s platform now connects a network of over 100,000 pharmacy professionals across 6 countries in the ASEAN region. mClinica’s technology is ubiquitous now being used by 1 in every 2 pharmacists in the Philippines, 1 in every 3 pharmacists in Indonesia and 1 in every 4 pharmacists in Vietnam.
In the last year and a half mClinica grew from just 1,500 pharmacy professionals in the Philippines and Indonesia to well over 100,000 pharmacy professionals across Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and Malaysia. mClinica has been able to do what others have only dreamed of, successfully penetrate and connect dis-aggregated and fragmented pharmacies in some of the most challenged markets in the world. Perhaps even more impressively they were able to capture pharmacies located in some of the most densely populated cities to the most rural areas providing an unprecedented platform for pharmaceutical companies, governments and NGOs to access pharmacies, their patients and data.
mClinica has deliberately flown under the radar and prefers to be seen not heard. Headed by Harvard-educated whizz kid, Farouk Meralli, their CEO prefers to stay off the magazine covers and just continue to conscientiously build out the network. Years ago, Meralli saw both a need an opportunity for mClinica to go where no one had gone before and address the challenges and constraints in the often overlooked but critically important pharmacy sector. In Southeast Asia he saw markets that were struggling with inefficient supply chains, poorly trained pharmacists, incomplete information on pharmaceutical products and legacy bottlenecks. Management points to a deep culture at the company whereby the team fundamentally believes in doing positive impactful work in an often constrained and challenged marketplace. Helping connect those communities that are disadvantaged by location or supply chain barriers using the mClinica technology platform as an enabler is something the team is passionate about. Farouk Meralli, Founder and CEO, states “we want make a positive impact and confront the difficult challenges in this space. We are here to change the way pharmacies operate and provide a platform so we can provide better health care outcomes for the public.” mClinica continues to command deep relationships at the highest levels with many governments, bilateral organizations, and NGOs with many approaching mClinica to use its channel and provide data analytics expertise to help them solve issues ranging from determining tuberculosis rates in a rural village in Vietnam to understanding the epidemiological landscape for diabetes in central Manila.
But here is where it starts to get interesting, mClinica is somewhat of a three-tentacled octopus. mClinica has three operating platforms – Connect, SwipeRx and SnapRx. mClinica initially opened in the market with Connect which enabled the company to establish their relationship with a veritable who’s who of companies like Pfizer, Merck, Novartis and Bayer. Connect was a mobile-platform which provided a previously unavailable channel to unite patients in some of the most challenging urban conditions. mClinica’s technology and platform was used to run patient affordability discounting programs, pilot patient access programs to drive better patient health outcomes and navigate these inaccessible communities to reveal new sources of health data.
On the back of the success of Connect, mClinica then developed SnapRx; a proprietary mobile application that electronically digitized prescriptions using machine learning and image recognition to move across the value chain and address challenges at the pharmacy-level. With SnapRx, instead of dealing with paper records that were often mishandled or lost, pharmacies could now seamlessly digitize prescriptions through the mobile app. Once the prescription data was aggregated in mClinica’s database, mClinica used their internal data analytics platform to provide computations of real-time public health data and provide deep insight at a forensic level of drug distribution and dispensation in these previously nebulous markets.
SnapRx was a game changer for the pharmaceutical data industry essentially transforming pharmacies across the country into a dynamic and accessible public health information network. Governments and NGOs quickly saw the appeal of this platform and the platform was recently mandated by the Department of Health (DOH) of the Philippines Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to exclusively provide public health insights and health outcomes. The DOH-FDA did not previously have a national health information system and database but in a matter of months mClinica was able to provide the solution at no cost to the government. Now for the first time, the Philippines has the ability to monitor disease outbreaks, predict healthcare trends and root budgeting for financial expenditures based on actual, real-time data. Through this mandate, mClinica will now power a health information system for 100 million patients nationwide making it the largest healthcare dataset of its kind in the world.
However, it is the third tentacle that has private equity funds and venture capital investors salivating. In keeping with mClinica’s mission of connecting pharmacies, mClinica launched SwipeRx. It started as a simple professional network to solve all the needs of pharmacy professionals. By bringing together news, discussion forums, drug information, accredited education and other tools it sought to solve real pain points for pharmacists and pharmacy professionals. It quickly morphed into a social networking juggernaut that now connects a community of more than 100,000 pharmacy professionals. Everyday more than 200 new pharmacy professionals join the platform. SwipeRx has become a veritable WeChat for pharmacy professionals, it is a social media application, an educational delivery platform, a messaging app, a government compliance tool and a crowdsourcing product in a fully integrated platform. It solves many of the key challenges of pharmacy professionals in one app. The growth statistics are nothing short of impressive. SwipeRx is now the largest mobile provider of accredited continuing education for pharmacists in Southeast Asia having educated more than 10,000 pharmacists in a matter of months. It is also the largest crowdsourced database of pharmacy-related answers having generated over 40,000 answers on everything from drug dosing advice to advice on symptom recognition since the feature’s release late last year. SwipeRx has gone from strength to strength generating millions of data points on the pharmacy ecosystem allowing stakeholders to gather valuable insights from the network instantly. However, the real opportunity is what lies under the hood of SwipeRx, now that mClinica has access to 150 million unique patients per month the possibilities are endless. Venture Capital firms are lined up to explore that next step – a marketplace, a pharmaceutical distribution platform or even a fully connected solution for an integrated pharmaceutical supply chain. One thing is clear, whatever the future in the pharmacy space, mClinica will undoubtedly be at the forefront.
For more information, visit: www.mClinica.com
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Company Name: MClinica
Contact Person: Beth Ann Lopez – Investor Relations
Email: Send Email
Address:28 Bukit Pasoh Road
Country: Singapore
Website: www.mClinica.com