Three passionate doctors founded doctHERs, which connects stay-at-home female doctors to the population in underprivileged areas through telehealth clinics. In eighteen months, they have set up eight facilities and treated over 100,000 patients, bringing quality healthcare to those who need it most.
Azhar Rizvi:
The idea behindDoctHERs immediately touched my heart. It took me back to 2005 when I had established the first telemedicine network with the help of PASHA, Pak Army, Rawalpindi Medical College and the International Telecommunication Union. The 17 centers established in AJK and KP provided treatment to millions, saved lives and were a great example of emergency healthcare. I was able to guide them in the light of my own experience, expanding their vision from a few clinics to hundreds in the near future.
Story of DoctHERs
Numbers depict a strange reality in Pakistan’s health system. According to the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council (PMDC), women make up 70 per cent of the 14,000 medical students who graduate every year in Pakistan. However, of all the women who graduate from medical school, only a small fraction pursuemedicine as a career. The others stop practising due to social pressures and cultural expectations. In 2015, out of the 150,000 licensed doctors in Pakistan, 70,000 were women; yet only 9,700 (13 percent) women were registered as specialist physicians.
Pakistan has a burgeoning population of close to 195 million, 40 percent of whom live below the poverty line. Despite this situation, the total annual healthcare spending in Pakistan is just US$37 per capita (compared with the WHO recommended US$62). Public sector spending on health is a mere 0.45 percent of the GDP. Each doctor in Pakistan is serving a population of at least 1,038 people, which clearly pushes the limits of the healthcare system to breaking point.
Dr Asher Hasan, Dr Sara Khurram and Dr Iffat Zafar are three passionate doctors who care about delivering quality healthcare to the underprivileged. They founded doctHERs, an organization that connects stay-at-home women doctors to health consumers in need of quality healthcare through telemedicine.
In less than two years, doctHERs:
has established seven clinics in Karachi and Khyber Pukhtukhwa (KPK), and a tele-psychiatry clinic in Mansehra.
has provided inclusive employment to twenty female doctors, nurses and community mobilizers. The doctors consult from their homes in Chakwal, Quetta, Karachi and London.
has helped 22,000 patients through their telemedicine clinics and impacted more than 100,000 people through six medical camps and health campaigns.
“At its economic simplest, the doctHERs model is all about connecting the unmet demand for quality healthcare to the untapped supply of home-based female doctors,” explains the co-founder, Dr Asher Hasan. “We use technology to address market failures and directly match supply to demand in a solution that is acceptable to the society in which we operate.”
Read Entrepreneuring Pakistan to understand the issues of setting up social enterprises to sere community
