OkCredit starts CoAid website to help search for Covid-19 medicines, equipment

New Delhi: OkCredit, part of Ok Network's ecosystem of apps for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in India, has launched a hyperlocal search tool to look for medicines and Covid-19 treatment equipment.

Using 'co-aid.in', the company will provide real-time information on the availability of medicines across the country, besindes contact details of stores for making inquiries. This, at a time when getting Covid-19 medicines has become an onerous task, OkCredit said in a statement. "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," it said.

These stores and businesses sell medical products and services such as Fabiflu tablets, oximeters, O2 beds, normal beds, steamers, antibiotics, zinc and vitamin supplements, and oxygen used for treating Covid-19 patients, the company said. "The data on oxygen and beds has been crowdsourced, whereas the data on medicines is from pharmacy stores on OkCredit's platform."


"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,"said Harsh Pokharna, co-founder and chief executive officer 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..."

OkCredit plans to enhance this simple and easy-to-use portal in the coming days and append it with other Covid-19 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."

The company said that within 12 days of launch, the CoAid 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, the highest 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."