Your Local Pharmacy Will Become Your Primary Care Provider

We are at the cusp of a healthcare boom in Africa, but this boom is not necessarily a positive one. The data below shows the percentage likelihood of dying from the four main NCDs (Non-communicable diseases) between the ages of 30–70 in each country studied. This is a ticking time bomb that needs to be addressed if Africa is to become a productive continent.

Image from Quartz

Everyday I ask myself, “How can we help people on their journey to good health?” At mPharma, our work is built around using the pharmacy as a platform to create healthier communities across Africa. We are working on models that deliver basic healthcare services through pharmacies on our network. We launched a service called Doctor@Pharmacy that enables anyone to walk into our pharmacies and receive a free, in-person consultation from a medical doctor. The adoption of the service has been strong. We have provided 24 hours of free doctor consultations to more than 280 patients. This is about 12 patients an hour and five minutes per consultation. We also partnered with Redbird to introduce their rapid diagnostic testing solution in our pharmacies.

My biggest take-aways from the successful adoption of our pharmacy clinical services are

1. It is expensive for patients to get a consultation with a doctor. It can cost you between $5-$30 to speak with a doctor. This is why most patients self-medicate and only go to the doctor’s office if their symptoms get worse. By making doctor consultations free, we have seen more customers consult with our doctor instead of self-medicating.
2. The pharmacy is the most visited space in the healthcare sector and pharmacists are more accessible to patients than other healthcare professionals. When a friend tells you they are going to the hospital, our immediate reaction is to worry, but we don’t have the same reaction if they go to the pharmacy. To get people to think about preventative health, we need to remove the inherent tensions and fears people have about seeking care in hospitals. The pharmacy is devoid of these barriers and provides a great opportunity to deliver preventative medicine to consumers in a space they trust. We can use our data to design targeted health interventions for specific communities. If a community has a higher prescription rate for high cholesterol medications, we can equip the local pharmacy with the tools and professionals to support prevention,while treating those with the condition. I am inspired by the work CVS Health is doing to transform its retail pharmacies into primary healthcare providers.

mPharma is recruiting a Director of Clinical Services to lead our health services strategy. You can learn more about this role here -https://www.mpharma.com/job-listings/director-of-clinical-services/

We want to transform the pharmacy from retailing drugs to selling good health.