The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
Door-to-door drug delivery coming soon
Having successfully set up shop in Vancouver and Toronto, Karim Nassar and his colleagues at Mednow have naturally set their sights on Dartmouth.
Mednow’s goal is to develop a national online pharmacy. Founded in 2018, the company is currently operating in Ontario and B.C.
“It made a lot of sense to start in Nova Scotia as the first step into the Maritimes,” said Nassar, whose company has already begun work on what it calls a fulfillment centre.
“It’s going to be new construction, in that the interiors have to be built out and created. But we have a location, we’ve secured a lease for a space in the Parkland Wellness Centre.
“The reason it’s called a fulfillment centre is because it’s not the kind of pharmacy you can walk into; it’s there to fulfill the needs of our patients that are using Mednow Pharmacy.”
Mednow’s (mednow.ca) business model is to enable clients to digitally submit prescriptions, which are filled and delivered the same or next day, depending on location.
“Our space is going to be approximately two thousand square feet, and the reason we’re starting with something small is because we scale our operations as we grow bigger,” said Nassar.
“In Nova Scotia, we’ll expect over time to have up to 10 people in that fulfillment centre. You have to have pharmacy staff, of course, and all of the logistics and fleet staff that are going to support getting medications to citizens of Dartmouth and Halifax.”
Nassar, the Mednow CEO, said his company’s goal is to expand healthcare access for Canadians, starting
with pharmacy.
“It’s not only a necessary thing because of the pandemic, but it’s a great business to be in. We have a market that we’re looking to disrupt of almost 47-billion dollars, which represents the Canadian pharmacy market. That market is absolutely ripe for disruption . ... It needs to catch up with other big industries like banking, just logistics in general.”
No narcotics
Nassar said drivers delivering drugs shouldn’t have to worry about being robbed because the company does not use this business to deliver narcotics.
“All our drivers are constantly tracked by our fleet management system ... but there will never be a situation where they have that much in drugs in their car,” he said.
“They have sealed packages that are only identified by the name and address of the person that needs to get them. It could be a combination of cholesterol and diabetes medication. But narcotics, in general, we don’t deliver because of exactly that risk.”
Mednow says half of Canadians who suffer from one or more chronic illnesses don’t take their medications as prescribed, and two-thirds of Canadians
over 65 are on more than three daily medications.
Nassar says their packaging and sorting should help with those problems, but Mednow does not make claims that clients will save money on their drugs.
“You won’t pay more than you pay at your traditional pharmacy. The service we provide is the differentiator,” Nassar said.
“Price is less and less important in Canada because of the way our healthcare system is funded. We’re actually in a place where the price ... is highly determined by the payer of the drugs, whether an insurance company or a provincial payer, they set the prices for drugs. That’s why we’re basing our business more on service than price.”
Nassar said Mednow will follow the guidelines of the Nova Scotia College of Pharmacists, and should be up and running by the fall.
“The build-out has already started; we’re working through the permits and the college of pharmacists approval, which should be in short order,” he said.
“It’s kind of an evolution that’s happening, so as we’re in this market there are other players coming in. You can see the need to transform to this digital channel, a delivery and onlinebased pharmacy.”