PharmBridge

PharmaBridge – Find your medication equivalent in Quebec

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Inspiration

What it does

PharmaBridge lets you search for any medication by its European brand name and instantly find:

Its Canadian equivalent (brand name + generic) The match type: exact same molecule, same molecule with dosage differences Safety alerts: prescription status changes, overdose risks, controlled substances Confidence level with reasoning

Practical tips specific to Quebec: which pharmacy chains carry it, whether you need a new prescription, what questions to ask your pharmacist

How we built it

The foundation of PharmaBridge is the RAMQ formulary is the official list of medications covered by Quebec's public drug insurance program. The PDF contains over 9,000 drug entries organized by therapeutic category.

We built a custom PDF parser using pdfplumber to extract the hierarchical structure: Category code,,Category name,Active ingredient,Form/Dosage,Products

Tech stack Next.js 16 + React 19 + TypeScript Prisma + SQLite (9,000+ medications in local DB) Claude Sonnet as AI fallback for unknown medications Tailwind CSS 4

Challenges we ran into

Finding reliable drug databases for Europe was hard because each country has its own format, language, and naming conventions. Matching a French brand name to its active molecule, then finding the Canadian equivalent in the RAMQ, required building a multi-step synonym pipeline from scratch. The hardest part was that the same molecule can have more than 10 different brand names across France, Spain, etc and none of them match the Canadian name.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

the gap between "published PDF" and "usable database" is enormous

What's next for PharmBridge

Expand to more source countries (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and for large immigrant communities in Quebec)

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