The problem
Your medicine has a different name in every country. Finding the equivalent abroad means a pharmacist, luck, or a forum thread.
The approach
Match by substance rather than brand: the national medicine registers of five countries joined on WHO INN names, with brand-collision detection, so a brand from home resolves to what the pharmacy abroad stocks.
What we learned
The data exists; the join is the product. Government registers disagree on everything but the substance, and the same brand can mean a different drug in another country. The caveat is part of the design.
Next
Whether to make it a product. Until then it stays an exploration, with the caveat in front.
- Status
- Exploring; it works, and it is not medical advice
- Runs on
- The web
- Since
- May 2026
- Built with
- Two Cloudflare Workers, D1, KV and R2; no language model at runtime
- Signature
- 12,368 products across five countries, about 4,000 WHO substances
The print
Hortus Botanicus, Leiden
Founded in 1590 so that students could learn medicine from the plants themselves.
Willem van Swanenburg, 1610.