When COVID-19 arrived in Connecticut, Leslie Asanga was a student at Yale School of Public Health while working part-time as a pharmacist in a retail chain in New Haven. Although people needed their prescriptions, getting medications became a momentous task as city and state lockdowns expanded. “I was concerned in particular for seniors and those with disabilities who weren’t able to get their medications,” said Asanga. To solve the problem, he founded Pills2Me, a startup of volunteers who delivered medications to those in need in the New Haven area. The program was so successful, that after Asanga graduated and moved to Las Vegas he started the program there – only bigger and with drivers paid through a fee for service model that still allows free deliveries to those in greater need.
Creating a business to solve a problem was something with which Asanga was already familiar as the co-founder of UrPharm. Established in 2019, UrPharm is an app that serves as a search device to find both medication and prices in Cameroon. “I knew I could contribute more to public health than being a pharmacist in one retail store,” he relays. “I grew up in a poor community in Cameroon. We didn’t go to pharmacies for medication, it was too expensive – so we thought. But, when I researched the costs, I found that medications through a licensed pharmacist literally can cost just cents more than what people are paying for medication through street vendors.”
While at Yale, Asanga enrolled in the Sustainable Health Initiative program for startup companies and worked virtually with a team based in Bangalore who helped with market research, presentation skills, and scale-up and measurement techniques. He credits the SHI program work with providing case examples for scaling more rapidly, a path that he is currently following with UrPharm. “We needed help in conveying the right messaging to our U.S. audiences about the responsibility Africans have to care for their loved ones even if they are in another country so they would better appreciate the need for the services of UrPharm,” says Asanga. “SHI taught us how to pitch to people with different perspectives and opinions and helped us understand what was needed to redesign our pitch to make sense to more diverse audiences.”
It wasn’t just expenses that stopped people from getting their medications, but also access. Cameroon residents can often visit up to ten locations to find a pharmacy that had their prescribed medication. Using UrPharm, a prescription is entered into the app and in seconds a person can see where they can purchase their medicine up to six hours from their location. The service will also compare prices at all locations. If they cannot get to the pharmacy, most locations will ship it to them for a small fee – which is easily offset by the amount of time and money saved not traveling to multiple pharmacies.
The UrPharm app receives more than 15,000 searches a month, demonstrating the demand. Asanga says UrPharm has potentially saved thousands of lives and is not just a search app, but in many cases, offers peace of mind to family members who are far away and unsure of whether their loved ones have been able to get their medications. Now when family or friends want to help relatives back home, they can directly use the app to purchase and have medications delivered. Asanga says this is not only a safer way than sending money and ensures a licensed pharmacist is providing safe and genuine medications. This way they can check that their family member has received and is taking their necessary prescription. The app also provides a reminder to the purchase when a reorder is due. “Trying to take care of loved ones in another country is stressful, but this way at least they know their necessary medication is getting to their loved one,” says Asanga. “Hopefully, that buys some peace of mind to family and friends who aren’t physically in the same place.”
And, by using the data from thousands of inquiries a day, UrPharm has the potential to be a valuable tool for public health interventions to improve pharmaceutical access.
This year, UrPharm plans to expand to Kenya as Asanga continues to raise funding to bring both companies into more states and countries. Seeing the fast acceptance and growth of the app, Asanga thought, “If we can do this with medication, how about food?” and partnered with one of the largest grocery chains in Cameroon to offer UrPharm Supermarket in 2022 so people can purchase food to send to families.
“My goal was to help people. And if I can help family members buy peace of mind when taking care of their loved one’s wellbeing, this is what makes me happy,” says Asanga.