Healthcare Innovator | iOS Developer | UI/UX Designer

PharmAssist

PharmAssist is app which can recognize a prescribed medication based on its physical characteristics or container. Our mission is to make patients safer through scan-based quality verification of pharmaceutical handling, along with medication management, vision based pill identification, and more.

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Our solution consists of a pair of mobile applications; one used by a pharmacist at the point of medication pickup, and the other used by patients. We’re able to minimize error in prescription handling through an additional scan based verification step of pill bottles to ensure the right medication, dosage, and instructions reach the patient. Patients can securely manage their medications, which can even be imported from one’s FHIR sourced medical record, including daily adherence tracking. Patient’s can confirm type and authenticity of medication through a vision based recognition system integrated into the app, ensuring they always know what medicine they are taking and important details such as dosage and frequency. Patient’s also benefit from a streamlined scan based medication pickup process facilitated through the combination of both apps.

We developed an iOS application with two different user interfaces; one for pharmacists and one for patients. For the pharmacist, this app is able to minimize error in prescription handling by adding another level of verification before any medication reaches the patient’s hand. This is accomplished by reading the barcode on the pill bottle in order to find the medication in the NIH database of FDA approved drugs and checking this information against the patient’s recent prescription history. In the future, we hope to incorporate OCR into the identification of the pill bottles to add more levels of verification by also extracting the Drug Name and other information from the label. On the patient side, the app can identify a pill based on characteristics such as its shape, size, color, and imprint.