CheapRX

Inspiration

I have severe acne. Two months ago, my doctor prescribed me biweekly Erythromycin. When I went to CVS to pick it up, they asked me if I wanted to pay $700 for the medication. I was shocked and called insurance, who notified that they had maxed out the insurance coupon on the drug and already reduced the price by $300. When I asked my doctor about it, he told me Erythromycin had been generic for years and that pharmacies can charge for non generic and don't have to tell you there is a cheaper generic available. I made this project to make it easy to look up any drug you've been prescribed and find the lowest price and possible generics.

What it does

This project scrapes drug providers' websites like CostPlusDrugs, Blind Health, and others to provide a list of possible medications ranked from lowest price to highest price. There is a link to buy and information on dosages to make shopping for prescription medication as easy as possible.

How we built it

I built this by creating scrapers for different drug providers based on the medication name inputted. This was the entirety of the backend and the logic was processing the scraped data from the providers. The frontend was built with TypeScript and Next.js for fast rendering and clarity.

Challenges we ran into

It was my first time using Python and Flask on the backend. I've primarily stuck with Node.js for backend so it was fun learning a new framework. I also don't have much experience web scraping which made learning Beautiful Soup and Selenium fun.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I really like the design. I was able to come up with it and implement it in a couple hours and I'm happy how it turned out.

What we learned

Healthcare is a really interesting problem and there are many different approaches that can help people live longer, healthier lives.

What's next for CheapRX

I'll build a better version and scrape more websites and store it in a SQL database to make lookup and queries much faster. I also plan on deploying production versions to make it more accessible to the public.

Built With

• flask
• mantine
• next
• python
• react
• typescript