Medsource Group Limited, led by the winner of the ‘CEO of the Year’ 2021 for Kenya, is a diligent and well-established company that is helping Kenya’s pharmaceutical infrastructure in becoming something globally competitive. Its easy to use, intuitive, and well-managed e-commerce platform is putting power back in the hands of medical professionals to make the best choices for their patients, and taking the pressure off of the patients by alleviating the need for elevated costs due to the disparate nature of some existing supply lines.
Led by exemplary mind in his industry, Vinod Guptan, Medsource Group Limited is a company bringing healthcare commodity supply chain to its region with diligence and tenacity. Fundamentally, it has seen the struggles that some of its peers in the medical sector have faced regarding getting the products to the people who need them, and so its goal is to better the entire ecosystem of this industry with last mile access to quality and affordable healthcare products for all. With East Africa’s healthcare market being estimated to be worth 4 billion dollars by 2020 – with a forecasted growth of 10-12% per annum between 2017 and 2030 – it is clear that this is a growing segment that just requires some additionally support to get it to reach that point of exponential development. Vinod himself is an incredibly talented and experienced senior manager, with several years of cross-functional experience behind him in the pharmaceutical and supply chain industry that makes him proficient in the leadership and management of teams across multiple business units such as sales management and business development.
Therefore, Medsource is one of the companies looking to help pivot Kenya towards a better future. With a focus on the pharmaceutical supply chain, it is bringing together what has become a fragmented and disparate element of the working ecosystem, with 70% of the market share covered by imports and only 30% by local manufacturing. Additionally, the distribution system is mainly multi-tiered, which puts the cost onto the patient. This is something that Medsource wishes to change, as having that burden of cost fall on the patient can be a serious preventative for patients getting the medicine they need, resulting in a market paradigm where only the well-off can receive the care they need.
Fortunately, Medsource has come prepared with an innovative response. Although it is aware that this system fragmentation has resulted in wider implications and issues such as an increase in falsified and substandard medicinal products, high supply chain costs, lack of product traceability, low technological acumen, lack of standardized process, and limited demand visibility, it flips the current trend in order to take a ‘last mile’ approach. In short, this pertains to its assurance that it will always work towards bettering accessibility as its core priority, meeting the needs of the most vulnerable populations in its region such as women of reproductive age, new-borns, children, and adolescents, being the guiding hand that makes sure they can get the care they need.
Creating a hustle-free supply chain is its passion and its mission, closing existing gaps of inequality and meeting the current market demand; it also takes pride in being a med-fin-tech company able to address gaps and challenges through a group purchasing model for pooled procurement, aggregating purchases from members and dispensers. Hence, Medsource can negotiate a better price and better discounts from its partnered manufacturers and distributors through the use of its digital e-commerce platform, training its dispensers through various capacity building programmes that allow them to build up their technical professional skills, good business management, book-keeping, and general good business practices without the need for years of strict training.
Additionally, it wishes to address the issue of the industry bottle-neck. Troublingly, in the pharmaceutical industry, there tends to be a lack of health financing and expensive working capital that the patient receives the bill for, and Medsource’s inventory financing product being powered by STANCHART technology is working hard to flip this on its head. With digital e-wallets, dissemination of the inventory financing, and reducing overhead costs, Medsource is able to streamline the additional charges and surcharges associated with pharmaceutical manufacture and distribution, benefitting the industry in the macro scale and the wallets of the patients.
This positive impact on the behaviour of the entire industry is what has secured Medsource’s reputation as an invaluable element in the sector, a linchpin uniting the disparate elements of Africa’s pharmaceutical industry and bringing them together in order to create a more united, cohesive, and technologically adept ecosystem that is prepared to take on the future. After all, with the modern medical challenges in mind, unity amongst medical professionals is more important than ever. By trading through its user intuitive and accessible platform, Medsource members have the advantage of increased savings to the tune of up to 24% depending on the product in question, the company having penetrated 81% of the counties in Kenya with a reach of over 600 members, 1,500 trained professionals, and an annual patient reach of 5 million.
Its range of over 15,000 products is another element that sets it in good stead with its market segment. It is aware that many medical complaints will require highly specific drugs and treatment in order to encourage good recovery, and so it strives to stock only the best of the best, and a wide variety of this so that a medical professional has the pick of what will be the most effective when it comes to deciding on a prescription. MedSource also boasts 5 decades of globally enriched experience in making this a possibility, having worked hard to set up a niche in its environment that it would not only excel in, but be able to grow even further into.
Its team are strong, capable, and qualified, providing the utmost transparency and helpfulness to clients so that they can always offer their clients the best products, best customer service, and guaranteed quality. Moreover, with Medsource’s inventory finance way of working, its capital solution, its direct distributor payment system set up through its platform, and its streamlining of the value chain with both digital wallets and credit limits, it has made itself the way forward for the medical distributions industry in order to allow Kenya – and Africa in the bigger picture – to step forward confidently into a fast-changing new epoch that is putting more and more emphasis on the importance of technology for business and communication.
