Inspiration
Transferring a prescription shouldn't be this hard. Between hold music, insurance networks, and never knowing if a pharmacy actually has your medication in stock, the process is exhausting even for people without any extra barriers. We wanted to build something for the person who's mobility-impaired and can't easily pop into three pharmacies to compare, the person who's Hard of Hearing and needs to know a pharmacist knows ASL before they walk in, or the elder who isn't confident navigating phone trees and automated systems. Prescription transferring is a universal annoyance, but for a lot of people, it's also a genuine accessibility barrier — and we didn't see anyone solving for both at once.
What it does
Prescription Junkie helps users find and compare nearby pharmacies based on what actually matters to them — not just distance. Users can search pharmacies filtered by criteria like insurance acceptance, walking distance, wait times, ASL/HoH-friendly staff, ease of access, parking availability, and more. Instead of generic "pharmacies near me" results, users get a shortlist tailored to their specific needs and preferences, saved to their account for future visits.
How we built it
We combined pharmacy location datasets (merged from multiple regional sources covering Appalachia and DC) into a unified database using ArcGIS Pro, cleaning and standardizing fields like address, coordinates, and ZIP codes across mismatched schemas. On the front end, we built a custom HTML/CSS/JS site styled around a hand-designed logo and color palette, using the ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript to render pharmacy locations on an interactive map with geolocation support. User accounts, preferences, and login were handled with a lightweight custom authentication system tied to structured text-based user records.
Challenges we ran into
Merging two structurally different pharmacy datasets — with different field names, coordinate systems, and ZIP code formats (text vs. numeric) — took more iteration than expected, especially preserving data integrity for edge cases like ZIP+4 codes and leading-zero ZIPs. We also hit repeated authentication hurdles getting our hosted feature layer to display without forcing users to sign in, which ultimately led us to a simpler, more resilient client-side data approach for the map rendering.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of designing an experience that treats accessibility as a first-class filter, not an afterthought — letting users search on things like ASL-friendly staff or parking accessibility right alongside more standard filters like insurance and price. We're also proud of the visual identity we built from scratch, from the logo's wave motif to a cohesive, calming color scheme that makes a stressful task feel a little more approachable.
What we learned
We learned a lot about the tradeoffs between hosted GIS services and simpler client-side data solutions, especially under a hackathon time crunch — sometimes the "correct" architecture isn't the fastest path to a working demo. We also learned a great deal about data reconciliation across inconsistent real-world datasets, and how much invisible cleanup goes into something as simple-looking as "pharmacy near me."
What's next for Prescription Junkie
Next, we'd like to build out a full prescription transfer workflow — not just finding the right pharmacy, but initiating and tracking the transfer itself. We'd also like to incorporate real user reviews tied to our accessibility and service-quality filters, so recommendations get smarter and more personalized over time, and explore partnerships with pharmacy chains to pull live, verified data instead of static datasets.
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