– Sobrus exists since 2011 with the help of Omar Sefiani and Yahia Zehraoui, two childhood friends. The main objective is to equip pharmacies with our fully digitalized solutions that allow them to manage their daily activity from start to finish. This ranges from patient management to managing their stock for their financial monitoring. It is a solution that also allows them to manage their sales to patients.
In 2011, we began by equipping pharmacies. Other solutions have been developed for other healthcare professionals. These include SobrusSNS for wholesale distributors, and SobrusLABS for laboratories. The objective is always to equip them with digital solutions that also allow them to manage their daily activity. Our goal is to connect these three main players, namely pharmacies, wholesalers and laboratories.
Thanks to our SobrusPharma solution, a pharmacy can order the products and medicines it needs online, can assess its stock and place its orders with wholesalers. And on a marketplace where the laboratory can promote its products and highlight parapharmaceutical products. The eleven years of activity in the field of e-health have enabled us to work above all on raising awareness to encourage pharmacists to go digital. Until then, the majority was not equipped, worked the old way, in registers where everything was recorded in pen.
– What is your main challenge, after integrating this ecosystem?
– After equipping healthcare professionals, the challenge is to be able to provide access to patients in the very near future. The real challenge is to be able to digitize this access for better patient care. This will allow the customer to have a medical file shared with pharmacists and doctors, centralized within his profile; to receive digitized prescriptions directly on its application to make reimbursement requests to insurers; and to keep traceability on a history of his medical file. All this will allow for better support.
– The first prize of 15,000 dollars was awarded by the jury to your start-up Sobrus. What business opportunities are available to you?
– We are happy to have participated in the SPARK program initiated by Huawei and Orange. Rather than business opportunities, this program provides us with partnership opportunities. The main objective of this program is to be able to establish a partnership with Huawei, acting on all aspects on a certain number of technological aspects, in particular everything around the cloud. And above all the opportunity for a startup like Sobrus to be able to capitalize on the experience and skills of a large international group like Huawei.
– Through cloud solutions, Sobrus is at the service of pharmacists, pharmaceutical laboratories and wholesale distributors. A way to deal with the risk of stock shortages in pharmacies?
– Indeed, the objective of equipping health professionals with cloud solutions tends to ensure better stock management at the pharmacy level and thus be able to counter the risk of stock shortages. Through digital technology and solutions that provide real-time stock status, pharmacists can anticipate their needs and easily order what they need.
On the other side, it allows to optimize the orders made from the wholesaler to the pharmacist. This allows the wholesaler, who delivers to pharmacists every day, to anticipate their needs. You should know that today, a pharmacy orders five to six times a day from wholesalers who deliver the pharmacy directly to its premises.
The main challenge for the wholesaler is to be able to optimize its logistics in order to also be able to optimize its costs, by optimizing deliveries. By ensuring that healthcare professionals are equipped with these solutions, the pharmacy can order by batch and have an overview of needs, instead of ordering drug by drug. On the wholesaler’s side, he will be able to succeed in pharmacies effectively.
– What is the shortfall for the Kingdom by digitizing this ecosystem?
– There is no real loss of profit by digitizing the ecosystem, but, on the contrary, there is everything to gain. By digitizing this ecosystem, the aim is to have better patient care. Morocco’s main challenge today is to cope with the generalization of AMO and therefore to deal with many more files. To meet these demands, digital technology will allow us to automate this follow-up and support.
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