SmartMED: An innovative startup that was born to save lives

• 29 September 2022
• by Admin

My name is Rand Ari, Dentist and co-founder of SmartMED. When I was in 3rd year in college, we were studying a subject about how the misreading of a doctor's prescription could affect the health of a patient, how the 1.0mg was read 10mg or misplacing decimal points causes fatal injuries.  Eventually, me and my friend came up with an idea to develop an electronic prescription to prevent such errors.

 

Small consistent steps coupled with a great goal

In our 4th grade, my co-founder Renwar Awat which was also dentist and a professional web developer started working on the project. At the end of the year, we came up with the prototype of SmartMED with only one feature which was electronic prescription then we sat with the other two co-founders of SmartMED and had an idea to develop the prototype furthermore and add new features such as patient appointments management and case file management since there were no local  professional software for health sector. Back then it was a good chance for us to develop our software to fulfill the need of the market.

 

In September 2017, we introduced the prototype to the market. At the beginning, it was difficult to convince doctors and health sector businesses to transfer their work to a digitalized business. We had only 2 customers in our first month of work, but we believed in our work and potentials to provide support to our customers and bring new customers. Month by month we started growing up slowly. Since we were providing our software as a service and charging our customers a minimum amount of money in comparison with the other companies also providing quality service and support, we managed to increase our sales.

 

There is always room for Business Development

Starting from 2020, we started participating in programs for business development such as Rwanga Foundation programs, and after participating in several programs and dozens of hours of lectures and three-time winning grant prizes, we were able to develop our business more to provide one solution for all health sector businesses. SmartMED currently has 7 employees including co-founders. We are operating in Kurdistan region in general, and we have customers in the middle and south of Iraq as well.  We have over 100 customers including medical clinics, Hospitals, laboratories, pharmacies, and pharma companies.

In 2021, we participated in Invest In My Idea platform introduced by Rwanga Foundation. This gave us a chance to present our business at HITEX 2021. Rwanga continued their support through a one-year program when they delivered topics on finance, marketing, sales, pitch delivery…etc.  In HITEX 2022, we took part in Rwanga’s Crowdfunding 2022 at HITEX which was a pitch competition and won the 1st place.

 

The Rwanga’s grant is used for developing our business by adding new features and developing new service to our customers, also expanding our sales and marketing, and doing market research.