[open-development] Introducing a private sector led Health sector Open Data initiative from Pakistan - A medicine search engine

[Fouad Bajwa]

Dear Colleagues,

I wanted to introduce Open Data Systems Private Limited based in the
city of Lahore in Pakistan with our official website at:
http://www.opendata.systems as well as share an exciting Open Data
initiative that we have been working and put together over the past
year.

The company with a strong social purpose was founded by a medical
doctor and public policy analyst. Our vision is to facilitate Open
Data initiatives for the public, private and social sectors. To this
end, this publicly available Open Data initiative will not only
facilitate the citizenry at-large but also contribute in the near
future with search analytics and reports to help inform the government
decision making process in the healthcare sectors.

We have recently launched a significant contribution to the nascent
Open Data ecosystem in Pakistan in the form of  "Seek Drug", a
medicine search engine or Pakistan's first open data drug index that
lists all the pharmaceutical and medical related medicine and drug
information for the public at large to freely access. This initiative
is in continuous development, testing and improvements available at
the following website address:

http://www.seekdrug.com.

This platform is helping to provide information about medicinal
composition information as well. Such salts can be sourced by the
public at-large as an alternative to expensive drugs and may help in
saving more lives. Seek Drug provides a price comparison engine of
over 18,000 medicines in the Pakistani market, it literally covers
everything so far. It also provides and easy to use and easy to access
tool over the Internet and cell phones to doctors, pharmacies, clinics
and hospitals important awareness and information on all the drugs
available in the Pakistani pharmaceutical market.

It would be good to get feedback. There are some important updates
happening as I speak including improvements to the UI as well addition
of some important features thereof.

We are also interested in Open Data partnerships, networking and
seeking volunteers and advisors to join us and help us in evolving the
open data ecosystem in Pakistan. We are also in the planing phase of
organising an open data lab and unconference during this year in
Lahore. We have considerable interest from multilateral stakeholders
and would like to learn if we can garner more interest and support and
also find Open Data experts that may be interested in joining us in
Lahore at some point this year?

-- 
Regards.
--------------------------
Fouad Bajwa
CEO and Chief Data Scientist
Open Data Systems (Private) Limited.
www.opendata.systems