Doctor of Pharmacy Gharib Zahran achieves part of his dream and establishes the first specialized website for doctors and pharmacists in Palestine, and aspires to make it a competitor website in the Middle East. “Medic” website will save doctors both time and effort while searching for drugs and their alternatives, instead of using the old method, which depends only on the Israeli and Palestinian drug records.

Ramallah- Palestine Economy Portal | Emad Rajabi- Pharm. D. Gharib Zahran (42 years old) establishes his website for doctors and pharmacists (www.medic.ps), to help them overcome the problems that face them the most during their work, at a time of rapid development in the sector.

The website, which is the first of its kind in Palestine, tracks news of medicines and drugs and provides it for doctors and pharmacists electronically. A simple mechanism: the doctor inserts the name of a medicine in the search box, and then gets all the details of that medicine and the available alternatives in Palestine, which saves him time and effort, and always keeps him updated on drugs.

Zahran who works in a pharmacy in Deir Abu Meshal village to the west of Ramallah, explains to Palestine Economy Portal: some medicines get withdrawn from the markets, and some others are newly produced by local and foreign companies that enter the market, but the doctors are not informed about them quickly. The website provides doctors with this information, in addition to finding alternatives for the medicines quickly, instead of searching through drug records.

Currently, doctors use the traditional method of checking both the Palestinian and the Israeli drug records to check the presence of medicines in pharmacies, and their alternatives. According to Zahran, this method consumes about five minutes.

Zahran updates the website based on these two records, in addition to the production lists of the pharmaceutical companies and several medical resources. He explained that he depends on more than one resource to verify information before posting it on the website.

Zahran says he faces many obstacles; the most important one is the lack of financial support to his website, which he aspires to make a competitor website in the Middle East. There are also obstacles in marketing “I’m surprised that some pharmacists do not know about the website yet though it has been there for two years now.”

In order to maintain the development of the website; Zahran put a new mechanism that includes a registration fee, a nominal amount of 100 NIS per year for those interested in using the website.

However, despite the modest possibilities, Zahran succeeds in attracting about 20 thousand professional visitors to his website every month.