Medtrack

Inspiration

Across Kenya and many parts of Africa, pharmacies are often the first place people visit when they become sick. Unfortunately, valuable health data from medicine sales is rarely used to identify disease trends or anticipate medicine shortages. We were inspired to build MedTrack to transform everyday pharmacy operations into a source of real-time public health intelligence. By combining inventory management, AI, and predictive analytics, MedTrack helps pharmacies stay stocked while providing early signals that can support stronger community health responses.

What it does

MedTrack is an offline-first, AI-powered pharmacy management platform designed for pharmacies, clinics, and health facilities operating in low-resource environments.

The platform manages medicine inventory, barcode-based dispensing, sales, suppliers, expiry tracking, and prescription records. Beyond day-to-day pharmacy operations, MedTrack analyzes medicine demand to identify unusual purchasing patterns that may indicate emerging disease outbreaks. It also predicts future medicine demand, alerts users to low stock and upcoming expiries, and supports safer dispensing through AI-powered medication safety checks.

Because it works offline and synchronizes when connectivity is available, MedTrack remains reliable even in areas with unstable internet access.

How we built it

React

TypeScript

Electron

SQLite

Node.js

Barcode scanner integration

AI-powered analytics for demand forecasting and anomaly detection

The desktop application stores data locally for offline operation while maintaining a modern and responsive user interface. The AI layer analyzes historical pharmacy data to generate forecasts, identify unusual medicine demand, and support future outbreak surveillance.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was designing a system that could operate reliably without continuous internet connectivity while still supporting intelligent analytics. We also had to balance a simple workflow for pharmacists with advanced features such as predictive inventory management and disease trend detection. Another challenge was ensuring that barcode scanning, inventory management, and reporting remained fast even with large medicine databases.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We successfully developed an offline-first pharmacy management platform that goes beyond traditional POS software. Instead of simply recording transactions, MedTrack transforms pharmacy data into actionable health insights. We are particularly proud of integrating inventory management, predictive demand forecasting, barcode workflows, and the foundation for AI-powered early disease detection into a single platform.

What we learned

This project reinforced the importance of designing technology around real-world healthcare challenges. We learned that pharmacies generate valuable data that can improve medicine availability and potentially support early public health surveillance. We also gained experience building offline-first desktop applications and integrating AI into practical healthcare workflows.

What's next for Medtrack

Our next goal is to expand MedTrack into a regional health intelligence platform. Future features include real-time disease hotspot mapping, automated outbreak alerts, medicine recommendation forecasting, prescription safety checking, interoperability with national health information systems, and secure anonymized data sharing to support public health agencies. We also plan to pilot the platform with pharmacies and clinics across Kenya before expanding to other IGAD member states.

Built With

• ai
• analytics
• app
• barcode
• data
• desktop
• electron
• first
• healthcare
• javascript
• learning
• machine
• node.js
• offline
• pharmacy
• predictive
• react
• scanner
• sqlite
• typescript