E-pharmacies:
What You
Need to Know
By V. Kumara SwamyA
few months ago, drawn by a
funny TV commercial and an
attractive discount (30 per cent!),
I decided to try buying my meds online.
Downloading an e-pharmacy app, I
registered myself, but my prescription
was three years old, hence the transac-
tion could not take place. But the plat-
form had a solution. I could consult
a licensed doctor through it. In a few
hours, I was talking to a Maharashtra-
based MD, who went through my med-
ical history, asked a few questions and
gave me what I needed. Within a day,
a licensed pharmacist delivered the
medicines at my doorstep. I had saved
around`300 on just one transaction.
Unwittingly, I had joined a growing
number of people buying their
medicines online. According to a recent
study by the international consultancy
firm, Frost & Sullivan, the e-pharmacy
market in India was estimated at
around $512 million (`3,500 crore)
last year and is estimated to gallop
to $3,657 million (`25,000 crore)
by 2022. These numbers are
actually small compared to
brick-and-mortar medical
stores. “Overall, e-pharmacies
are 1.5-2 per cent of the $18
billion (`1.26 lakh crore) pharma
industry in India. Business has
picked up in the last three years,
as it works well for the chronic
patient use cases,” says Dharmil Sheth,
co-founder of PharmEasy.
In fact, the bulk of medicines on
demand from e-pharmacies are indiapictureReader’s Digest42 august 2019
HEALTH
The full deets about buying
medicines online