Software Business in the Middle East

While my partners were developing the prototype, I tried to find out a way how to get information about the drugs registered in United Arab Emirates. It was clear that there would be two major sources of information - pharmaceutical companies that develop and produce drugs and Ministry of Health that is responsible for drug registration before they are allowed to be marketed in the country.

Pharmaceutical Companies

When I was meeting with the pharmaceutical companies, I got two different reactions. Some companies liked the idea and promised to send data about their drugs to us. Probably, those companies looked at our project as one more way to market their products. Other companies said they wouldn’t help us. This reaction was strange to me - we didn’t ask for any technology secrets or know-how, the information we needed was basically from patient leaflets inserted into each and every single drug package. This data are available to every patient who buys the particular medication. In some cases I got impression that those companies were afraid giving any data for public access - probably for some reasons they did not want to give information about all their drugs to one single company as us.

Luckily, the majority of companies said they would give us their data either in format of pdf files or at least as hard copies on papers.

But that never happened. After a while, when I started to make follow up calls to check why we hadn’t got any data yet, I got a reaction that people tried to postpone giving us data. It is kind of local “feature”. If somebody does not want to help you, he would not tell it to you directly like “sorry, but I cannot help”. Instead, that person stops answering your e-mails or phone calls, and if you succeed reaching him over the phone, he would answer you something like “oh, sorry, dear, I got too much stuff to do, but I will send you all data by the next week, don’t worry”. And then nothing happens again.

Finally, there were only 2 companies out of 150 that gave us their data. One of them sent drug information by e-mail, and another one sent a courier with paper materials and CD.

Ministry of Health

Ministry of Health (MOH) was kind of interesting thing to contact to. I learned about two things:

1. They do not keep drug information in electronic format, and I had really hard time to find somebody, who would be able to answer the question if MOH kept any drug data at all. I would understand if somebody from HR Department of MOH couldn’t answer this question, but when Drug Control Department was not able to give me the proper answer, it sounded pretty strange to me. Especially knowing that Drug Control Department of Ministry of Health is responsible for drug registration before the drugs are allowed for marketing and prescribing in the country. I know that MOH was trying to develop kind of Drug Information System since 2003, but the system is far away from being completed till now. Speaking about Ministry of Health from our today’s perspectives, I can say they’re making a lot of improvements nowadays. They got new Minister of Health, and new Executives, so it seams that new management team there is very active. It is good for the community and for us.
2. MOH has a price list of the drugs registered in the country. That was good news, at least we got a way to know what drugs existed on the market and how much each of them costs. This drug price list is available for public, and it is normally updated monthly.

Besides pharmaceutical companies and Ministry of Health I also talked to several large healthcare organizations like Dubai Healthcare City and couple companies that develop Drug Database in USA and Europe.

Dubai Healthcare City told they would be interested to discuss the usage of our drug database as soon as it’s completed. It was a positive point, as they had plans to build around 12 hospitals and around 300 clinics by year 2010.

Companies that develop similar Drug Databases for USA and Europe were First DataBank and CMP Medica. Our idea was that we would probably cooperate with big guys, who are not yet presented in the Middle East. We had a discussion over e-mails with the Sales and Marketing Director of First DataBank, and his conclusion was they would need some time to think and calculate benefits and risks - basically, they wanted to understand if expansion to the Middle East was something they’re interested in.

CMP Medica was slightly more active. They called me a few times from their office in Singapore asking questions about market potential, but finally nothing happened with CMP Medica either.

I did not expect that it would be so difficult to get drug information. Without those data, our project made no sense - drug information is a key point in it. The situation was pretty strange - I saw the real interest from doctors to have such program for this market, but at the same time we had almost no chance to get drug information needed to build the drug database.

To be honest, at that time I started to seriously think about if I really wanted to fight further trying to get the data and keep project running. As an option, I could move back to Sweden and start working at Siemens again and accept the offer to move temporarily to the US office. It was clearly a weakness from my side, but that was what I felt at that time.