OKCredit Launches ‘co-aid.in’, a hyperlocal search tool to look for medicines and COVID-19 critical equipment in your nearby area

2024-12-26 04:26:11 News & Society

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New Delhi, 12 May 2021: Amid the raging Covid-19 second wave, OkCredit, has announced the launch of a website - Co-aid.in to help people in distress discover verified leads for Covid-19 critical medicines and equipment. The portal provides real-time information on the availability of medicines pan India besides the contact number of the store for making enquiries. Users can search for availability by either entering the location name or the pincode on the portal.

At a time when getting Covid-19 medicines is an onerous task, the initiative is aimed at helping people access such medicines easily by knowing where they are available. The company is open-sourcing data of over 2 lakh pharmacy stores and businesses on its platform. These stores and businesses sell medical products and services such as Fabiflu tablets, oximeters, O2 beds, normal beds, steamers, antibiotics, zinc/vitamin, and oxygen used for treating Covid-19 patients. The data on oxygen and beds has been crowd sourced, whereas the data on medicines is from pharmacy stores on OkCredit?s platform.

OkCredit has plans to further enhance this simple and easy-to-use portal in the coming days and append it with other Covid critical resources available in the public domain. Co-aid.in also allows pharmacy stores and businesses that are not on the OkCredit platform to register themselves on the website.

Within just 12 days of launching, the website has seen queries from 342 towns and cities, within and outside India. Search queries have also come from New York, Singapore, Seattle and Los Angeles among a number of other international locations. In India, highest number of searches have come from Bengaluru, Delhi and Kolkata but smaller locations such as Panipat, Muzaffarpur and Ranchi have also used the tool to search for nearby pharmacy shops.

Besides the pharmacy search tool, OkCredit is also encouraging people to volunteer for Covid-19 SOS requests. Known as Co Aid Volunteer (seen at the top right on the Co-aid.in website), the platform lists out volunteering opportunities for people. These could be oxygen or bed requirements, medicine needs etc. One can search through Covid resources on various platforms to help out such people in need.

Sharing his views on the initiative, Harsh Pokharna, co-founder and CEO of OkCredit said, ?People are overwrought with anxiety, fear, and the unending feeling of helplessness amid rising Covid cases. This is a time for mutual collaboration and leveraging human connection to make the lives of Covid patients and their families a tad easier. At OkCredit, we are committed to leveraging our deeper and wider reach within the pharmacy stores and businesses to facilitate the availability of essential drugs and equipment used for treating Covid-19 patients.?

In these challenging times, OkCredit is giving high priority to the welfare of its employees as well. The company recognizes that mental health of employees is a crucial factor in their overall health. Towards this, it is making mental wellness counselling available to them.

Additionally, OkCredit has tied up with Practo, India?s leading online doctor consultation app, to take care of their doctor consultations, covid testing, priority support for ambulances, beds, medicines, mental wellness counseling, etc. The company is also encouraging employees to take time off to take care of themselves and family. It is not counting any time off in the month of May as "official leaves".

About OkCredit

OkCredit is a part of the Ok network- an ecosystem of apps aimed at digitizing small and medium businesses (SMBs) across India. With technology that is simple and easy to access, OK is solving various pain points in everyday functioning of small business owners, be it tracking their accounts, managing staff at their set-up or the need to go online. Ok network?s first product- OkCredit was launched in 2017 by Harsh Pokharna, Gaurav Kumar and Aditya Prasad, all three of them being batchmates at IIT Kanpur. OkCredit has given a complete digital makeover to the traditional register book - ?Bahi/Udhar Khata? and made the daily bookkeeping task simpler and effective for millions of small businesses. The app not just helps small businesses keep track of credit transactions ? both payments and receivables, it sends timely reminders, and also makes it easier for them to collect and settle balance amounts quickly. The app has seen more than 20 million downloads and can be accessed in more than 10 Indian languages. Currently, it has over 5 million active monthly users which include over 100 types of businesses like kirana store owners, mobile recharge shops, medical stores, apparels amongst others. The venture has raised $83 million from investors to date including from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Tiger Global, and Y Combinator.