DoctHERs Wins First Position in MITEF’s Business Acceleration Programme

DoctHERs, a women-led health care start-up has been awarded a place in MIT Enterprise Forum’s entrepreneurship development programme. This programme will further boost women entrepreneurship in Pakistan. The programme involves serious training schedule and meeting with potential stakeholders.

DoctHERs is a healthcare marketplace that associates female doctors to millions of deserving patients with the help of internet-enabled technologies such as video conferencing, on-ground nurses, community health workers and community midwives.

DoctHERs Wins First Position in MITEF’s Business Acceleration Programme

According to Dr Sara Khurram, the co-founder and project manager of DoctHERs, almost 80% of medical school students are female but only 25% of the registered doctors are women which reveals that female doctors are not able to practice due to socio-cultural limitations.

The healthcare start-up is an effort to reduce this gap by getting female medical graduates back into the workforce who have stopped their practice because of getting married or having a child. It provides training to community health workers or community midwives to help doctHERs in evaluating patients at point-of-care using diagnostic tools, which enables to make a new health care chain.

The inventive solution to a main healthcare problem facilitated DoctHERs win first position in MITEF’s Business Acceleration Programme (BAP) in the category of women-led startups. DoctHERs is joined by OutDoor Advertising Assets (OAA), which won the competition in established companies track, and QueB Technologies, which won in the research track.

BAP is an annual competition that assists Pakistan’s IT, telecom and new media companies speed up their progress. The winners get an opportunity to join a fully-funded entrepreneurship development programme (EDP) at MIT in Cambridge, US. The start-up expects to be a static data engine that gives customers cheap, transparent, and readily available digitized evidence.

According to Pakistan Software Export Board’s website, some of the companies that took part in this programme saw their revenues increase by five to 10 times and valuation rise by 15 times. For example, Sofizar’s revenue increased from less than $1 million to $30 million in two-and-a-half years.

Also Read: MITEF Pakistan Organizes Programme to Include ‘Women-led Technology Start-ups’