Son develops an app to help patients find the medication they need

Ameen Hadeed’s father had heart surgery in 2015 but finding the drugs to aid his recovery was not easy. The clinic had no medicine, so Ameen had to find prescriptions for his dad, a process that was expensive and time-consuming.

“It was very stressful. Without the medication, he could have died,” Ameen said.

Five years later, Ameen created a new app, the Pharx app, that directs patients and relatives to pharmacies that have the medication they need and indicated where products are most cheaply available.

“People don’t have much awareness about the prices of medicine, they end up buying very expensive medicine without knowing the real price,” Ameen said.

Ameen created the Pharx app with Ammar Alwazzan, a developed, the app includes a network of almost 200 Mosul pharmacies. It is free to use and liberates patients from the closed-loop of private medical facilities, doctors and pharmacists tied to commercial drug representatives.

After three months of incubation process for the idea, Ameen won funding from the Iraq Response Innovation Lab and launched the app in March 2020. The app has been downloaded more than 500 times. There are legal constraints to prescribing and Iraq is still a cash society, Ameen hopes his app will help patients and independent pharmacies.

Adapted from: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/may/12/just-the-toni...