Egyptian virtual clinic app, Doctor Online will receive a new funding in the second quarter of the year, its co-founder and chief executive Mahmoud Abdel Hakim said on Monday. Revealing the company's new strategy for 2021-2022, Abdel Hakim said the it plans to introduce a new idea for online medical services to cater various needs of patients. According to Abdul Hakim, Doctor Online has been incubated by the Falak Startups, a business accelerator affiliated with the Egypt Entrepreneurship and Innovation Company affiliated to the Egyptian Ministry of International Cooperation. He announced that the platform is expecting the joining of a new institution to pump investments in exchange for a share of the capital within the current month. The company plans to add new services, such as requesting x-rays and tests immediately after the examination. Doctor Online already provides many services, including; setting an appointment with doctors, conducting an examination through video calls, informing the doctor of test results, and referring the patient whether to the radiology and analysis centres, or to the doctor's clinic. He explained that the platform also enables patients to book another consultation, without the need for paying any additional expenses. The examination expenses are up to 50 percent cheaper than those paid by the patient at the clinics in their traditional form, he added. Doctor Online aims at saving the time of both the patient and the doctor, Abdul Hakim explained. The app offers the patient a detailed report. This helps achieve a kind of correlation of the disease history of each patient on the platform. It also encourages reliance on artificial intelligence techniques to determine the type of clinic that the patient needs in case he does not know. Abdul Hakim said that the Doctor Online platform commenced its work in the Egyptian market in 2019. The outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic contributed to the rapid growth of Doctor Online's activities in the market. In 2020, Doctor Online recorded more than 4,000 appointments for 100 doctors on the platform, while the number of subscribers so far has reached 14,000, he added. Doctor Online is expected to achieve more than 50,000 appointments this year, and 500,000 in 2022, Abdul Hakim said. He also explained that the doctors on the platform are very carefully selected, as they mostly represent doctors from a range of Egyptian universities, including: Cairo University; Ain Shams University; and Alexandria University, among others. This is in addition to a number of Egyptian doctors in the UK, who provide medical consultations to patients from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Sudan, Abdel Hakim said.
