M

obile app developers not only see the technology as a basis for selling things but also for connecting customers with suppliers and producers, even in the case of medicine and food.

M-Health Tech has come up with Apotik Antar, an app that provides within-hour delivery of prescription medicine as well as over-the-counter drugs purchased from currently 200 pharmacies in Greater Jakarta to their buyers.

The delivery service is carried out in partnership with the Go-Jek app, whose ojek (motorcycle taxi) drivers serve as couriers.

M-Health Tech CEO Jonathan Sudharta said the business idea come from his passion to elevate Indonesia'€™s health care ecosystem, where access to services is still limited.

'€œAccess to health care in Indonesia is still poor because of the infrastructure barrier, and traffic is also so bad, especially in Jakarta, which got the first rank in the worst-traffic index from Castrol last year,'€ he told a press conference in Jakarta on Wednesday.

The app, launched on Jan. 11, is usable only in Greater Jakarta for now. Next month, the CEO said, people in 12 cities would be able to enjoy the service. The system would also be improved to allow for electronic payment in addition to the current cash-on-delivery method.

The expansion to 12 more cities follows the availability of Go-Jek, which includes Surabaya, Bandung and Makassar.

'€œBy the end of the year, we target to have reached secondary cities across the archipelago to implement our vision of easing health care access,'€ said Jonathan, who comes from a pharmacy business family.

He said the momentum was right for the business to go mobile. Previously Apotik Antar, established in 2012, was only present as a website linking customers to pharmacies by phone.

'€œSo when people called us, we'€™d call our partnered drugstores one by one. It was overwhelming, you can imagine,'€ he reminisced.

With the app, the business now receives more than 100 orders daily, compared to 20 to 30 when it was based on the website.

The business complies with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act'€™s code of conduct in sharing clients'€™ drugs needs only with authorized bodies, in this case the Indonesian Health Ministry.

Various other drugstore brands are also banking on apps to improve their delivery business, such as K24 Klik, Century Apotik Online, Apotek1 and Apotekmart.

While Apotik Antar does not stock any drugs but instead only links end users and pharmacies, the names above run their respective apps with stocks of their own.

Customer comments on Google'€™s Play Store, where the Apotik Antar app can be downloaded, are generally positive, with users saying the app helps them buy drugs without having to travel. Startup expert and founder of the DailySocial blog Rama Mamuaya called the phenomenon of businesses starting to use apps to enhance customer services '€œinevitable'€.

'€œThe concept of apps and these tech startups is basically to eliminate the middleman. So it will penetrate any industry that has middlemen and break up the old system. Various business sectors will evolve accordingly,'€ he said over the phone.

The rapid development of startups has prompted President Joko '€œJokowi'€ Widodo to envision Indonesia as a country with advanced tech companies. He has proclaimed a target of seeing two so-called unicorns, or startups with a valuation of more than US$1 billion, each year until 2020.

Rama said the target was feasible with the support the industry was receiving from the state today. Jokowi has visited the biggest startup incubator, Silicon Valley in the US, twice since he was inaugurated in 2014 and has opened up the e-commerce business to foreign investors to enhance competition and trigger development.

He considered three big startups in the country to almost be unicorns today, namely Go-Jek, ticket marketplace Traveloka and e-commerce site Tokopedia.