Olha Semchenkova, Director of Quadrasoft ETMS and creator of digital solutions for Ukrainian pharmaceuticals, explains how to build projects that become new industry standards, how to work with sensitive data, and why connecting retail outlets across the country into a single database matters.
The pharmaceutical market is unlike any other: here, the products are life-saving medications, and their sale is heavily regulated. Having the right product at the right time in the right pharmacy isn't just an economic issue—it's socially significant. Pharmaceutical digitalization expert Olha Semchenkova solved this problem with new technology: her "Penetration" service tracks the availability and distribution of medications across all pharmacies nationwide in real time. Olha is the director of the innovative enterprise Quadrasoft ETMS and project manager of the "My Pharmacy" project. Under her leadership, the company's projects have united over 10,000 Ukrainian pharmacies into one information network and formed the foundation of a new digital infrastructure for the pharmaceutical market.
Today, she speaks at digitalization and sales conferences, conducts corporate training for companies, serves on the jury of the international Aitex Good for Tech hackathon, and is a Glonary Awards: Women in Business winner.
In this interview, Olha Semchenkova discusses how real-time analytics transforms scattered data into a coherent and manageable system, and why digitalization helps the industry survive and grow in an era of major changes.
— Olha, tell us more about your "My Pharmacy" and "Penetration" projects: is it true that together they meet the needs of both customers and businesses?
The first project, "My Pharmacy," is a service for users. The portal shows customers the availability of needed medications and their prices in real time. In just a couple of minutes, without leaving home, a person gets a list of nearby pharmacies that have the product they need, price comparisons, and the ability to reserve medications. For pharmacies and manufacturers, this means additional traffic, managed demand, and analytics on search sessions and conversion of reserved items into purchases.
"Penetration" is a DaaS service for pharmaceutical companies. It allows daily monitoring of product presence on shelves, constantly providing up-to-date data. The service covers 8,000 pharmacies across Ukraine and enables companies to analyze sales, brand presence in the market, build planning strategies, and compare availability at competitor pharmacies.
— How did the ideas for these projects come about? You have extensive experience working with pharmaceutical companies, distributors, and pharmacy chains—how much did that help in development?
The ideas for both services came from a real problem that my colleagues and I faced every day. Everyone's probably been in a situation where a doctor prescribes a list of medications, and you start going from pharmacy to pharmacy to find them and compare prices—wasting time with no guarantee of results. That's where the idea came from to create a website where you could enter a list of medicines and immediately see where they're available and how much they cost. With the "My Pharmacy" project, we started literally from scratch: building databases, connecting pharmacy chains, creating code to receive and update price lists. Initially, data was updated several times a day, and now it happens in real time.
The "Penetration" service is more specialized. Working at a pharmaceutical company, we saw data daily, analyzed product availability, sales dynamics, and assortment—and started noticing a troubling pattern: even the most popular drugs, actively prescribed by doctors, were often simply absent from pharmacies in certain regions. There was demand, there was advertising, but people complained about medication shortages. These are direct losses for companies that can't earn money simply because the product isn't on the shelf. That's how the idea emerged to create a tool that would give pharmaceutical companies the ability to see in real time where their product is, where it isn't, and why.
From the very beginning, we set out to create not just a reporting system, but a living tool that would help make decisions daily. Ultimately, the project tracks so much data that it helps companies plan strategies ahead.
— Pharmaceuticals really is a very sensitive industry. There's a lot of personal and commercial data, and any information can have value. How do you work with this data?
We understood this, so when creating all our solutions, we initially built in the principles of privacy by design and data protection by default. The first means privacy built into the product from the start. The second means automatically enabled strict privacy settings, so users don't have to worry about it. Data protection is very important—it's the foundation of trust between us and our partners.
What we did: we eliminated storing unnecessary information and decided to depersonalize all data so there would be no way to identify specific individuals. We also decided to limit data access: companies only see their own metrics, and employees see information needed to perform their tasks.
We transmit and store all information only in encrypted form, automatically log user actions, and block unauthorized access attempts. All partners sign NDAs and DPAs, and teams undergo regular information security training.
— Currently, the "Penetration" service covers 8,000 pharmacies across Ukraine. Thanks to it, companies reduce labor costs for pharmacy monitoring, increase supply transparency, and minimize patient refusals at the point of sale. But this was once something completely new for the market. Was there resistance?
At first, we were met with scepticism, because no one likes something new and not everyone is ready to learn new things. In the early stages, we had to prove the significance and benefits of the service through real company case studies, and only then did understanding come about how important this kind of analytics is for company operations and sales growth.
Resistance to new technologies is a problem that exists worldwide. This especially affects pharmaceuticals because the market is conservative, regulated, and any innovation is perceived as a risk.
New technologies make processes visible, and not everyone is ready for that level of openness. Not everyone immediately understands what benefits digitalization brings; many are used to old methods and don't want to change anything. We saw this ourselves with "Penetration": initially, many pharmaceutical companies perceived it as a control tool, but when they saw how the data helped increase sales and reduce losses, attitudes changed dramatically.
You can only explain the importance of digitalization through results. Any business responds to concrete facts: where we're losing, where we can earn more, and how quickly we can change it. I saw this clearly when we launched our projects—belief in technology appears when the effect is visible to the naked eye. For example, when sales in a specific region grow 15-20% in a month after implementing analytics.
— You've been in the pharmaceutical industry for many years: you've gone from database manager to company director, became a Glonary Awards Women in Business laureate, served on the jury of an international hackathon, and published scientific articles about the role of business process automation in enhancing the operational efficiency of pharmaceutical companies and trends shaping the world of the pharmaceutical market. Digital transformation has already happened. What do you think will be the next stage?
Having worked in this field for many years, I've truly seen the market from the inside at every stage. And I can say: Ukraine's pharmaceutical market has enormous potential, but there are also systemic problems holding back its development.
We lack a culture of working with data—many companies still make decisions by gut feeling, without analytics, simply not understanding how to use information. There's no end-to-end digitalization showing the complete path of a product and demand for it—too many manual links in the chain from the doctor prescribing the medication to the pharmacy where the patient buys it. There are no unified integration standards—each network has its own formats, databases, and APIs, which complicates information exchange. And there's still not enough open dialogue between market participants and joint digital projects.
There are also numerous positives. Ukrainian companies know how to respond to crises, restructure processes, and find unconventional solutions—this is a unique trait, especially noticeable during wartime. Our country has powerful developers and product teams creating innovative tools. More and more companies understand that data isn't about competition, but synergy. And aggregators, like ours and our colleagues, are already forming a new culture of management and interaction. Essentially, the Ukrainian pharmaceutical market is now going through the same transformation that Europe went through several years ago: from manual management to data-driven strategies.
— Your products have become a new industry standard, giving patients the opportunity to get needed medications and companies the ability to compete successfully in the market. But speaking of industries, how different is the pharmaceutical market from other sectors? What needs to be considered when optimizing business processes and in promotion?
The pharmaceutical market is heavily regulated—the law controls every step. In the pharmaceutical market, unlike others, not just brands compete, but active ingredients, dosages, and release forms. This creates complex demand dynamics, where even a small change affects sales of an entire category. Companies' work is built on medical representatives and regional managers, and their effectiveness directly depends on what data and tools they have at hand. Plus, the pharmaceutical market changes more slowly than others. So for us, implementing any project is always three steps: show the value, prove it in practice, and teach people how to use it. And also—don't chase trends. Innovation should be for the sake of benefit, not hype.
ⓒ 2025 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
