PharmaRelief

Inspiration

Pharmaceutical waste is a major issue. Many of our team member have experienced pharmacies throwing out medicine three month ahead of time. While researching we found $7 billion worth of resalable pharma products are returned to manufacturers annually. Disposal of regulated medical waste, including pharmaceuticals, costs 119% more per pound than regular trash.

What it does

The application is a tool that connects pharmacies and those that need medication. The goal is to reduce pharmaceutical waste by decreasing the number of returns, while increasing accessibility of medicine to patients with financial need. Unlike other accessibility solutions it doesn’t add more medicine and waste to the system it sorts by distance, dosage, and exclude expiration less than 14 days.

Research Findings

We found certain medications that have little variation, such as insulin, are ideal. Incentives, such as deposits, can prevent abuse of the system and discounts for pharmacies.

How we built it

We used streamlit to create a web application connected to a mongodb database hosted on google cloud. It makes a api call to google maps distance matrix api to find the distance from your location to the pharma.

Challenges we ran into

Non of us ever did web development before and it was our first hackathon; we had an ambitious project. So of course, we had attempted to become full MERN stack developers and spent 11 hours learning how not to make a web application. Learning so many different languages we got stuck on front-end react. We decided to switch to python and salvage our database.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Connecting our application to a cloud database and having a project that actually works after repeatably failing.

What we learned

Full stack development is difficult. How post/get requests work, connecting to cloud databases, and database querying. As our members are from different universities we became great friends and learned about Pitt and Temple.

What's next for PharmaRelief

Future implementation will be a full stack web application. Make an application for the pharmacies to fill out the data. Employ interactive map. Data collection of demographics and needs.

Built With

• google-cloud
• mongodb
• python
• streamlit