RxGuard
According to the WHO, medication errors contribute to over 3 million deaths every year, most of them in low and middle-income countries where no pharmacist exists to catch a dangerous prescription.
Core trick
Sends a photo of a handwritten prescription to Claude vision for OCR, then checks extracted drugs against FDA and NLM data and rejects any flag lacking a citation.
Description
According to the WHO, medication errors contribute to over 3 million deaths every year, most of them in low and middle-income countries where no pharmacist exists to catch a dangerous prescription. RxGuard is built for those patients.
My wife is a pharmacist in Belgium. When I asked her what she does before giving a patient their medicine, she described checking every drug interaction, every contraindication, every patient-specific risk. Most patients in Bangladesh (my home country) never get any of that. They hand over the prescription, get the drugs, and go home. That gap is what RxGuard is built to close.
RxGuard is a prescription safety checker for patients in Bangladesh who do not have access to pharmacists due to the critical shortage of qualified pharmacy professionals in the country. A patient photographs a handwritten prescription, answers a few questions about themselves, and RxGuard flags any known dangers and then tells them to return to their doctor.
Claude Opus 4.7 does two things:
1. Reads handwritten Bengali and English prescriptions using vision OCR, and
2. Reasons over real FDA and NLM clinical data to detect drug interactions and patient-specific risks.
Every flag requires a verified citation from OpenFDA, the NLM Drug Interaction API, or the WHO Essential Medicines List. RxGuard never recommends alternatives, never changes doses, and never stores patient data. It only flags potential risks and recommends returning to the doctor.
Our goal is to scale RxGuard beyond Bangladesh, to every country where pharmacists are scarce and patients are at risk. According to the WHO, 2 billion people worldwide lack regular access to essential medicines. We cannot train thousands of pharmacists overnight, but we can put a prescription safety check in every pocket. Starting with Bangladesh, expanding to Africa, South Asia, and every underserved region where a wrong medicine can cost a life. Our goal is clear and simple: no prescription should go unchecked.
README excerpt
# RxGuard > A prescription safety checker for patients in Bangladesh who have no pharmacist nearby. In Bangladesh, doctors write prescriptions by hand — in Bengali, English, or both. Patients take those prescriptions to a pharmacy and buy whatever is written, with no one checking for dangerous combinations, contraindications, or patient-specific risks. There is no digital safety net. RxGuard is that safety net. A patient photographs their handwritten prescription, answers five questions about themselves, and RxGuard checks it against real clinical databases — FDA drug labels, NLM drug interactions, WHO Essential Medicines — and flags anything dangerous. Its only instruction is: **return to your doctor.** Built for the **Built with Claude** hackathon using Claude Opus 4.7. --- ## How it works **1. Read** — Claude Opus 4.7 vision reads the handwritten prescription (Bengali, English, or mixed) and extracts each medicine with a confidence score per field. Unreadable fields are flagged honestly, never silently guessed. **2. Translate** — Brand names (Napa, Seclo, Ciprocin) are resolved to generic names using a curated Bangladesh drug database, covering the most-prescribed brands in the country. **3. Check** — Three APIs run in parallel: - **RxNorm (NLM)** — resolves generics to standard drug IDs - **OpenFDA** — pulls real FDA-approved label warnings and contraindications - **NLM Drug Interaction API** — checks all drug pairs against the ONCHigh dataset **4. Reason** — C