RxPlain

home page
meds page - food combinations
meds page - detailed food combinations
meds page - add your medicine
meds page - calendar tracking
meds page - find nearby clinics
meds page - see what others are saying
meds page - post your own thoughts

Inspiration All four of us have parents or grandparents whose English isn't strong, and we've each watched a bottle come home from the pharmacy that nobody in the house can really read. The label says "1 TAB PO BID W/ FOOD," and the kids end up translating words they don't understand either. We built RxPlain for our own families first, around one rule from our sponsor conversations: never invent a dose. Only read back what the bottle already says.

What it does RxPlain turns dense medication labels into plain language you can read, hear, and share. Scan or type your bottle's directions, and it restates them in everyday words, quotes the official FDA label, and reads them aloud in English or Spanish. If anything can't be verified, it says "check with your pharmacist" and shows no number. It also offers a sourced food guide, a private dose calendar, a rural clinic finder, and a moderated bilingual community.

How we built it RxPlain is Next.js and TypeScript on Vercel. Grok reads bottle photos, rewrites label text, moderates, translates, and summarizes; Grok Voice speaks English and ElevenLabs speaks Spanish. Evidence comes from openFDA, RxNorm, MedlinePlus, the FDA, HRSA, and CMS. The dose explainer retrieves official label text, checks the daily total against a maximum-dose table, and runs guardrails so every number shown appears on the bottle or in the label. Otherwise it fails closed.

Challenges we ran into The hardest part was deciding what to leave out. Every feature made the site more useful but busier, and we kept balancing enough to matter against simple enough for Tony to use. The clearest example was drug interactions: we built a feature that explained what could go wrong when two medicines are taken together. It worked, but that claim needs a pharmacist behind it, and we don't give medical advice. So we removed it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of This was the first real college hackathon for all four of us, and we shipped a working product in a weekend. More than that, we are proud of where it came from. Each of us built RxPlain thinking about a parent or grandparent who struggles with a medication bottle, and we ended up with something that can help far more people than our own families.

What we learned We learned two very different things. Technically, we picked up Cursor and Grok from scratch after the sponsors gave us free credits, and by the end they were doing real work in the app. On the product side, the Bloomberg sponsor changed how we thought about the whole project: when output can affect what someone puts in their body, a confident wrong answer is worse than none, so we learned to be precise and careful about false reads.

What's next for RxPlain We want to add more languages through the same translate-then-speak pipeline, and partner with pharmacies so a QR code on the bag opens the patient's own plain-language card, with text reminders driven by the calendar. That partnership is also the incentive for companies to work with RxPlain: a pharmacy that puts our code on the bag gives its customers a clearer, safer way to understand their prescriptions at no extra cost.