As a digital champion,  Swiss Alpinopharma  continuously innovates and experiments with new ideas. One of the ideas in their pipeline was to facilitate access to scientifically and medically validated medical cannabis information and treatment to people who could benefit from it. The medical cannabis patients in Germany are estimated at 100k as of 2017, with an estimated 800k people that could benefit from the treatment.

The use of medical cannabis is highly regulated in Germany, making it very difficult for Doctors to work with publicly insured patients. Given such potential for helping those in need through a profitable business model in a highly regulated market, we were approached to validate the idea, by performing in-depth research, prototyping and testing the idea with real users, and creating a business and technology roadmap to implement. While at the same time investigating the current regulatory frameworks and how to make life easier for Doctors to provide the treatment to patients.

Solution

We designed and tested multiple solutions and ventured out the most promising one as a low-tech MVP. We developed a concept of operations and tested the product with customers in multiple cities in Germany. After receiving positive feedback from the market as well as generating first revenue, we designed the architecture and roadmap for a scalable solution that could be used for a full product launch.