Kolkata: Yuvraj Shah, an eleven-year-old boy from Kolkata, has created an app that helps connect individuals who have extra medicines with people who need them but cannot afford them.
Across India, many underprivileged people don’t have access to medicines which often leads to even common illnesses sometimes posing severe life risk.
Sometimes, there’s also shortage of medicines in the government hospitals due to which even patients who are covered under government’s healthcare scheme don’t get the medicines and cannot afford to purchase them from private shops.
With the increasing cost of medicines in India, Yuvraj felt the need to have some way of helping people who cannot afford them.
To tackle this, Yuvraj has created the Medmaze App, which helps people to donate their unused but not expired medicine to government hospitals.
Yuvraj’s Eureka Moment
One day, Yuvraj noticed that his grandfather’s medicine was not being used after he finished the required dosage and realized that many unused medicines could save lives when he saw leftover medicines being thrown out after the expiry date.
Usually, a doctor prescribes medicines to a patient for the complete course of treatment that may last several weeks. The patient goes and buys medicines from the pharmacy for the entire course of treatment.
However, in most of the cases, the patient gets cured before he consumes the entire set of medicines and stops taking the medicines as soon as he or she gets cured. This leads to a lot of unused medicines in every household.
This gave the 11-year-old the idea of creating an app that could help people donate unused medicines so others could benefit from them.
How does the App work?
The app allows individuals to connect with the nearest government hospital and donate the leftover medicines, reports indiatoday.in.
Once logged in, the Medmaze app allows users to provide details of the medicines like name, expiry date, number of strips available, etc.
The hospitals can then log in to see the details and connect with the users to get the medicines. The hospitals can in turn give them to those who cannot afford them.
How Yuvraj created the Medmaze app
While learning coding on the WhiteHat Jr platform, Yuvraj thought of using his learning to create an app to solve this issue and help people in need. This is when he decided to build the Medmaze App.
Yuvraj has been selected by EdTech startup White Hat Jr, as one of 12 students who would get to go to Silicon Valley to meet Google scientists, Waymo engineers and noted venture capitalists.