Pioneering e-portal in India attracts registrations
24th April 2015
The Coalition’s Innovation Fund recipient Pregna International Ltd. has launched Doctorstore, an e-commerce platform where doctors can purchase RH commodities—IUDs, pregnancy test kits, manual vacuum aspiration kits, and others—directly from suppliers for delivery within two to seven days. To date, more than 300 doctors in the Indian state of Maharashtra have registered on Doctorstore, and the orders have been placed on India’s pioneering provider-targeted portal.
This initiative was designed to address difficulties doctors faced in assessing the quality of commodities procured, and the inaccessibility of new and underutilized commodities. The portal also helps disseminate basic information, and enroll and motivate providers to procure commodities through the portal to help ensure access to a basket of quality commodities. The project intends targeting 1500 providers in the private sector in Maharashtra and it is expected that out of these, at least 500 doctors will start ordering quality commodities from the portal during the time frame of the project.
The portal is also being promoted for use under the UK aid-supported Project Ujjwal through more than 900 private providers in rural areas of Bihar and Odisha for sustained access to FP/RH products. Efforts are underway to modify buying habits of clinic providers from the traditional methodology of ordering through distributors to purchasing these commodities online. For more information, please contact Anita Deshpande on adeshpande@rhsupplies.org.