Software Business in the Middle East

I could pretend and tell about how smart and cool guys we were finding an excellent solution for our problems. But everything was not so cool, and, to tell more, we had nothing to do with the solution at all. It simply was a contingency or pure luck, I would say. One of those that could change your business or even your entire life.

On one of my endless meetings at that time somebody said he knew a professor from the local medical university, who had been working with the subject of drug database and medical errors for several years. I got a phone number of this professor, and we met already in couple hours.

It was a perfect match. The professor had collected and analyzed drug data for the last five years. His only problem was to find out a way how to organize his data as a computer program. He tried once asking some of the programmers to develop software for him, but they all spoke different language – both parties had issues in understanding medical terminology from one side and computer stuff from another.

We did not have problems with either medical or computer terminology, but we had problems with getting drug data.

At that time I really didn’t figure out how big luck my meeting with the professor was. After a while we decided to work together – the professor would be responsible for medical content of our drug database, and we would drive the technical implementation.

Looking now at our continuous cooperation, I could tell that my new partner keeps doing great job for getting new contacts. He lived in Saudi Arabia for many years working at that time in the only medical university in the Kingdom. His students graduated for 10-15 years back are now working as top executives and decision makers in the official healthcare authorities and large healthcare organizations in Saudi Arabia. It means that many doors are opened for us just with one phone call from our professor.

Finally, we got a very good team – one of us got deep medical knowledge, and others had rich technical background. Later, after having many troubles with moving sales forward, I had understood how badly we needed a professional salesman in our startup – in this case we would have just a dream team.

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.

As I wrote last time, we decided to concentrate our efforts only on developing Drug Database for United Arab Emirates. The first thing we needed to do was to describe clearly what exactly we wanted to develop and how, who our customers would be and how we’re supposed to reach them.

What to Develop and How to Develop

Basically, we simply specified the scope of the functionality that we thought would be essential for the first version. The list was reviewed several times. We added some of the features and moved other ones to the later versions. The list of requirements for the first version was based clearly on our own experience.

Here we came to the first problem. Drug Database is software that allows you to search for specific drugs by certain criteria and where you can read the full details about the particular drugs. Logically, the program consists of two parts: (a) database and User Interface, and (b) drug details. We had no problems with the database and User Interface - it is all technical stuff, and all of us had IT background and a lot of experience. The problem was where to get drug information from. This was number one in our issue list.

Who Our Customers  Would Be

It was clear that our customers would be doctors, pharmacists and organizations where all these people used to work - clinics, pharmacies and hospitals. The definition of our customers was pretty obvious. In the future, we would also be able to develop a web site available for public, where people can simply go and learn more about drugs they got prescribed by their doctors, but it was just a bookmark for the future ideas.

At that time we wanted to concentrate ourselves only on Healthcare Professionals.

How to Reach Our Customers

When we discussed all these product and marketing issues with my partners, I made an experiment. I called about 50 different doctors in Dubai - some of them I met on Networking Events, some of them were known to the people whom I met on Networking Events, and others I found on Healthcare Directory of local Yellow Pages. This experiment mainly had two goals. First, we needed to hear the opinion of healthcare professionals about our product. The second, I wanted to learn and practice in making cold calls, meeting with people, talking to them and showing them the presentation if time permitted. There were only 3 or 4 out of those 50 who said our idea was crap. It was very good result, I think - the majority of doctors I met with used to have some books with drug reference information they brought from their home countries, some of them used some kind of free and limited software they downloaded form the Web, but none of them had access to any information about drugs registered in UAE. This fact made me feel very optimistic. Another good thing with all those meetings was a good chance to review our list of requirements for the first version. It made a lot of sense to listen to the professionals to understand better what functionality is important for them.

By that time, we saw only one option to reach our customers - by making cold calls. Those 50 calls and meetings made me feel comfortable that I would be able to call about 5-10 people daily to make an appointment and try to make a sell after we have completed the first version.

As the next step, my partners back in Sweden started to develop a prototype of our first version, and I started to run around looking for different options how to get drug information. Drug information is the main part of any drug reference source and it was the most important task for us to find a solution and get drug details for our product.