MediTrust

Inspiration

Access to safe and authentic medicines remains an important challenge in Nigeria. People often struggle to identify reliable pharmacies, find the medicines they need, and obtain trustworthy information about medicines before making purchasing decisions.

We recognised an opportunity to use technology to improve medicine discovery, verification, and access while strengthening the connection between patients and legitimate pharmacies.

This inspired us to develop MediTrust.

What It Does

MediTrust is a HealthTech platform designed to make medicine discovery and pharmacy access more transparent, accessible, and reliable.

The platform aims to provide:

Medicine Discovery: Enables users to search for medicines and access relevant medicine information.
Medicine Verification: Supports medicine authenticity checks and access to trusted medicine information.
Pharmacy Discovery: Helps users identify pharmacies and locate available medicines.
Pharmacy Management: Provides digital tools to help pharmacies manage their medicine catalogues and operations.
Reliable Medicine Access: Connects customers with participating pharmacies to support safer and more convenient medicine access.

How We Plan to Build It

MediTrust is designed around a master medicine catalogue supported by verified regulatory information, with a focus on data accuracy and consistency.

Our proposed technology architecture includes React Native (Expo) and TypeScript for the mobile application, Node.js and Express for backend services, PostgreSQL for database management, Prisma for database operations, PostGIS for location-based pharmacy discovery, and Redis for caching.

Microsoft Azure is our proposed cloud infrastructure.

For payments and pharmacy settlements, we intend to integrate Paystack’s subaccount and split-payment capabilities so that payments can be routed to participating pharmacies without MediTrust operating an internal wallet.

Challenges

Some of the major challenges we are addressing include maintaining accurate medicine information, building a reliable pharmacy database, designing a scalable architecture, and ensuring that medicine discovery and verification can work effectively within the Nigerian healthcare environment.

We are approaching these challenges through a structured, catalogue-driven architecture and a pharmacy-centred operating model.

What We Learned

Developing MediTrust has reinforced the importance of building technology around real-world problems rather than simply creating another digital application.

We have also gained a deeper appreciation for the importance of data integrity, secure payment architecture, regulatory considerations, and scalable infrastructure in building healthcare technology.

What’s Next

Our goal is to develop MediTrust into a trusted digital infrastructure connecting medicine information, pharmacies, and consumers across Nigeria, with the potential to expand into other African markets.