Overview
DoctHERs is a healthcare marketplace that connects female doctors to millions of underserved patients in real-time with the help of internet-enabled technologies, video conferencing, on-ground nurses, community health workers, and community midwives.
Nearly 80% of medical school students are female but only 25% registered doctors are women, an indication that female doctors are not able to practice due to socio-cultural constraints, according to Dr. Sara Khurram, the co-founder and project director of DoctHERs.
The healthcare start-up is an attempt to bridge this gap by bringing female medical graduates - who can’t practice because of getting married or having a child - back into the workforce, she wrote in a column for this newspaper.
Social Impact
It trains community health workers (trusted nurses) or community midwives to assist doctHERs in assessing patients at the point-of-care using diagnostic tools, which create a new healthcare chain.
BAP Involvement
An annual contest, BAP helps Pakistan’s IT, telecom, and new media companies accelerate their growth. Every year about 15 companies go through four months of training and mentoring to participate in BAP’s three tracks: existing businesses, women start-ups, and researchers’ tracks.
The winners get a chance to attend a fully funded entrepreneurship development programme (EDP) at MIT in Cambridge, US. The intensive training programme is followed by road shows as Pakistani entrepreneurs meet venture capitalists, angel investors, and serial entrepreneurs in the US to develop their business on a global scale.