Pharma'Poche

Pharma'Poche, France's #1st app on PC and Smartphones
How our application works
Pharma'Poche Logo

⚕️ Your pharmacist and a lot more right into your pocket! ⚕️

The problem our project solves

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, haven’t you heard someone saying “Oh, I’ll no longer take anti-inflammatory drugs, they say they're not good with the COVID-19” or “No, I won’t take the risk to go to the doctor and get infected just to get an information” or “Nevermind, if I run out of medicines, I’ll wait until the end of the crisis to get some, it’s no big deal.”

Indeed, during the COVID-19 crisis, patients with other pathologies than COVID-19 are avoiding medical and paramedical services for fear of moving around and being contaminated by the virus. Some other patients are stopping their medicated treatment because they are getting misinformation through the social medias and internet. Thus, newly diagnosed patients with chronic diseases are put apart because health services are overcrowded, leaving them on their own when they need reliable and quick healthcare.

Not monitoring their illness and not responding to their concerns may have mid-term/long-term deleterious consequences. Our project addresses this problem urgently during these difficult times.

Secondly, our idea will allow for everyone to gain access to professional advices of a pharmacist, about medicines deliveries and therapeutic monitoring of their pathology requiring specific treatment at any time of the day or the night, even during the weekend. Our target are chronically ill patients.

All of this fit into coordination of care between health professionals, especially with the introduction of digital health in order to build a complete patient record and improve patients’ commitment to their treatment.

What Pharma'Poche does

What we offer as a startup, is a service that could help bringing closer patients to healthcare professionals. If we study the case of the french countryside, we come across what’s called a medical desert. That means one usually has to travel 25 to 40 minutes on average to reach his closest pharmacy. In these troubled times, getting there might even be impossible. We think this issue can be solved with an app called Pharma'Poche. Its’ functionality is quite straightforward : you can call at anytime and from anywhere a pharmacist ready to answer any questions regarding healthcare. The app works both ways, pharmasists use it as a way to connect with more people and expand their network. Let’s think of two other cases where this app might be useful : If you are in a faraway foreign country and you just got bitten by a snake, you might worry about the consequences of such an event. Imagine the healthcare system in said country is an issue for you, either because you are not trusting them or because you do not share the same language. PharmaPoche allows you to, with the push of a button, interact with an expert fully committed on helping you. One last example we can think of is someone suffering from a chronic disease. These persons usually require a lot of care but also to be well advised on their situation. Most of the time, doctors aren’t able to fully explain everything because of their tight schedule. Pharmapoche could give the possibility to these persons to always be well informed, without losing anyone’s time.

What our team have done during the weekend

This weekend we were able to improve our project and in particular develop our business plan by taking advantage of the advice of the mentors of the hackathon #EUvsVirus. In addition, we were able to develop our prototype which allows our project to become even more concrete. It was a very rewarding experience that allowed us to improve our project with our team.

Pharma'Poche impact to the crisis

Our solution allows patients’ follow-up, even during health crises. Indeed, with this solution, patients won’t have to leave their homes in order to get an information or a service from their pharmacist; besides, it is ensuring the respect of lockdown rules and helping to limit the virus spread.

This solution also prevents pharmacists from being exposed to the virus because they won’t have to leave their premises in order to reach their patients, as pharmacists will only meet their patients in-person when it comes to retrieve their medicines.

Challenges and necessities in order to continue our project

What we need both as a company and as entrepreneurs is a reliable way of getting interesting data. Indeed, if we want to build and expand upon this project, one of the most important resources for us is information. Moving forward, we’ll require to be able to know precisely what are the numbers of our potential audience and what is their spread around France. If the first round of data shows to be consistent and usable, we could think of expanding our app to the nearby countries. Getting to know where and what are our customers looking for is the bedrock of a good feedback-based improvement.

More precisely, the ideal information we would like to lay our eyes upon would be a geographical map of potential users so we could develop à response accordingly.

Pharma'Poche values after the crisis

Although the Covid-19 crisis could benefit from our proposed application, it was never fully intended for that use case in the first place. As a matter of fact, Pharma’Poche first saw the light of day a few months before the crisis got to be. At it’s core, our idea resides in the fact that the french position of pharmacist is undergoing a shift that is deeply changing the dynamic of his role. Nowadays and possibly more in the future, the pharmacist's role is to explain and answer customer’s questions and fears. The app was initially intended to facilitate that dialogue between these two parties, and that functionality will always be a major component of it, hence the point of using it well after the crisis