The Covid-19 pandemic has caused havoc across the world as none of the countries, however mighty their capital strength and political prowess be, were well prepared to handle a disaster of this magnitude leading to the loss of millions of human lives, socioeconomic distress, negative impact to small & medium businesses and deterioration in livelihood of families.

The immediate remedy aka vaccination for any such new outbreaks was expected to take time, but people were struggling to even get access to basic healthcare facilities to alleviate the suffering and recover from the Covid infection.

While the world has witnessed may outbreak of virus strains such as SARS, H1N1, and Swine flu over the past two decades , their scale were limited to certain part of the world. The underestimation of likelihood & impact of such occurrences has led to over-optimized health care models which were simply not designed to scale on demand. The problem was further compounded by the fragmented and unstructured pharma market leading to further chaos in distribution channels.

Scarcity of basic healthcare facilities led to the exorbitant prices, counterfeit drugs and prolong distribution time leading to mental agony and lost human lives.

There is a huge opportunity to revolutionize the pharma distribution channels to address many of these underlying problems. We have already seen an emergence of B2B pharma marketplaces which aim to bring together key stakeholders like drug manufacturers to stockists, and distributors . However, B2B marketplaces will only solve part of the supply chain puzzle as it does not fully address the last mileage problem.

Stockiests and pharmaceutical agencies should consider digitalizing their distribution models through enterprise collaboration platforms, digital marketing utilities, advance mobile work force automation techniques and business intelligence tools to ensure that the right medicine is known, made available and delivered to the right hospitals, clinics, doctors, pharmacies and community care centers through a transparent and timely manner under full compliance of country specific medical regulations.

Pharma agencies and distributors should also consider reaching pharmacies directly via digital channels to minimize dependency on physical visits typically required in the traditional setup.

Are you doing business in the pharmaceutical industry ? Pls feel free to contact our Acuitologist for a non-obligatory cost-free discussion to learn more on how digital transformation can exponentially grow your business and make your local community a better place to live in.