Partnership between SwipeRx and benshi.ai will Empower Pharmacies through AI to Improve Health Outcomes in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Singapore / Spain / 14th June 2022 – SwipeRx and benshi.ai jointly announced today that they have entered a partnership to utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to assist pharmacies with prediction of demand and deliver behavioral machine learning-based interventions to pharmacists. The goal is to ensure that every pharmacy is well stocked with essential drugs, and that each pharmacist has the right information at the right time to better assist their patients.

The partnership centers around integrating SwipeRx’s flagship mobile app, used by over 235,000 professionals from 45,000 pharmacies across six countries in Southeast Asia, with benshi.ai’s machine learning platform. SwipeRx innovated a community-driven commerce model that unites the fragmented pharmacy channel on a single platform enabling pharmacists to access all the information, education and medicines they need. From online education, to centralized purchasing and logistics, to financing pharmacies SwipeRx helps pharmacies better serve patients and manage their businesses. In Indonesia alone, more than 8,000 retail pharmacies, amounting to a quarter of all pharmacies in the country, are on SwipeRx, with over 5,000 of them joining its digital purchasing network and transacting on its B2B platform.

benshi.ai’s machine learning software integrates with apps to track, label and organize the vast amount of data logs in order to process the data and build personalized predictions and recommendations. The goal of benshi.ai’s platform is to democratize adaptive interventions – interventions that can be delivered when and where they are needed – and analyze their causal impact through an adaptive (reinforcement learning-based) experimental design

Under the partnership, SwipeRx will be integrated with benshi.ai’s machine learning platform. By unlocking the potential of data logs, benshi will generate demand forecasts for individual pharmacies and behavioral predictions for each pharmacist. The personalized predictions and recommendations provided to each SwipeRx user will further boost their work.

For example, benshi.ai’s machine learning platform can predict the demand for each medicine or test within each SwipeRx user’s pharmacy, and then deliver personalized recommendations so that the user can make better-informed decisions about the amount and timing of their drug purchases. This could prevent stock-outs of a certain drug or test due to sudden surges in demand related to an evolving health situation in the local area served by the pharmacy. In addition, the efficiency and value of drug purchases would also be optimized for these SwipeRx users.

Since pharmacies are a main point of healthcare access for millions of people across Southeast Asia, this partnership will create a direct impact on the front lines of care delivery in the region. In addition, the partnership is expected to further boost research into machine learning-driven algorithms and recommendations that are adapted towards low-resource settings.

CEO and Founder of SwipeRx, Farouk Meralli, said: “With benshi.ai’s powerful platform and our massive data sets, we have the opportunity to create an even better future for patients across Southeast Asia through our pharmacy network. This is a real world, practical application of artificial intelligence to radically improve the quality, affordability and availability of medicine.”

CEO and Founder of benshi.ai, Dr. África Periáñez, said: “I am genuinely excited about the collaboration with SwipeRx. Supply chain optimization via machine learning is an area in which the benshi.ai team has extensive experience, and I feel that by supporting SwipeRx’s work we can have a significant impact on the lives of millions of people in the Southeast Asia region. We look forward to further enhancing the accessibility of drugs and tests, as well as the efficiency and quality of the assistance that pharmacy professionals provide to their patients.”

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For media and other queries, please contact:

SwipeRx
Lindsay Nickel [email protected]

benshi.ai
Sumiko Tanaka Pusch
Head of Operations and Partnerships
[email protected]

About SwipeRx

SwipeRx, formerly mClinica, is the largest network of pharmacies in Southeast Asia connecting over 235,000 pharmacy professionals from 45,000 pharmacies. SwipeRx pioneered the community-driven commerce model that unites the fragmented pharmacy channel on a single platform enabling them to access all the information, education and medicines they need. From online education, to centralized purchasing and logistics, to financing, SwipeRx caters to the unique and pressing needs of pharmacies, a critical public health channel.

About benshi.ai

benshi.ai is an AI organization with the mission of democratizing adaptive interventions and experimentation. benshi.ai researches and builds machine learning software to advance global equality. Formed by a team coming from the video game and e-commerce industries, benshi.ai‘s machine learning platform enables mobile health applications to offer a personalized journey and maintain revolutionary engagement rates.