Botika Locator

Find which botika in your town has your medicine before you go.

Find your medicine

Type a medicine name, or a symptom such as headache or lagnat.

Common searches

Tap a medicine to search without typing. You can also type a symptom, such as headache or lagnat.

Is this info wrong?

What was wrong? Required

Choose what was wrong.

About Botika Locator

The Mission

Botika Locator exists so that no family in the Philippines has to spend fare and a whole afternoon looking for a medicine that was already on a shelf two streets away.

The project began with a physician's own family. A grandfather on maintenance medicines for diabetes and hypertension needed a refill. The first botika was out. So was the second. The medicine was eventually found, but only after a trip to Iloilo City that should never have been necessary.

That is the ordinary experience this service is built around. For a patient with hypertension or diabetes, a missed refill is not an inconvenience — it is a gap in treatment. A senior who travels to town and comes home empty-handed has lost money they could not spare and a day they needed.

The idea is rooted in Barangay Tiwi, Barotac Nuevo, where families routinely travel to the town proper searching for maintenance medicines — and in the practice of a physician from the same municipality. A trip that starts in a barangay and ends empty-handed costs fare and half a day.

The problem is not complicated. Before you leave home, you should be able to check which licensed botika in your own town has your medicine today.

No app to install. No account to create. No price to compare. One question answered plainly: who has it, and how recently did they say so.

Core Principles

  • Availability only — no prices

    We show whether a medicine is in stock, never what it costs. Publishing prices would turn a public health tool into a price war, and the small neighborhood botikas this service depends on would be the first to leave.

  • Zero patient tracking

    Residents never create an account, and no personal or health information is collected, stored, or shared. There are no advertising cookies and no third-party analytics, in line with the Data Privacy Act of 2012 (RA 10173).

  • PhilHealth GAMOT & YAKAP support

    Where a medicine is on the PhilHealth GAMOT list and the botika is GAMOT-accredited, the listing says so, so a resident can be guided to free medicine instead of paying out of pocket. This follows the YAKAP outpatient benefit, which covers eligible members up to the annual benefit limit with a valid prescription. Eligibility is always confirmed at the counter; the site shows the badge, never a price.

Design Principles

  • Plain — the words people already use

    The interface is plain English, with Hiligaynon alongside the three stock states and the prescription notice, written at the reading level of a text message. A resident sees a search box and a short list of botikas — not a medical dashboard, and no account to sign in to.

  • Fast — small enough for rural data

    The resident page is 33 KB compressed before its two self-hosted fonts, so it does not ask anyone to sit through a download on mobile data. A search is a single request to the database rather than a page reload, so the answer comes back without a full refresh.

  • Intuitive — two choices, then a search

    Choose a province, choose a town, type a medicine. The pharmacy side is a list of switches, one per medicine, with a single button that confirms the whole shelf, plus a short profile for opening hours and a public phone number. Both are meant to be shown once at the counter and understood.

  • Private by design — nothing to hand over

    Residents hand over nothing: no account, no name, no phone number, no advertising or tracking cookie, and no third-party analytics. A pharmacy supplies only the business details it wants published. This is structural rather than promised in a policy: there is no patient record in the database to fill in, which is the position the Data Privacy Act of 2012 (RA 10173) asks for.

Three fields stand between a resident and an answer: province, town, medicine. Everything else on the page is there to support that one result.

For Pharmacies & Botikas (Join the Directory)

If you run a licensed botika or pharmacy anywhere in the Philippines, you can be part of the directory. Send us your store details and the medicines you usually keep, and we will set up your listing and walk you through the one-tap stock update page.

There is no cost to participate, no software to buy, and no personal mobile number required — each botika receives its own store code and PIN.

Submit Pharmacy Information & Medicine List

Free participation. Help your community find maintenance stock before traveling.

Privacy notice

Botika Locator is private by default. Residents are never asked for a name, a phone number, a prescription, or a medical record, and there is no account to create.

What we never collect

What stays on your device

The site saves the last province and town chosen in the browser's local storage, so they do not have to be picked again on the next visit. That saved preference never leaves the device. The medicine typed into the search box is sent to the server to look up stock, and is not stored against the person who searched.

What we hold about pharmacies

For pharmacies, we only store publicly available business information (name, address, phone) and stock availability to show to residents.

Problem reports

The "Is this info wrong?" form is anonymous: it stores the pharmacy, a reason, and whatever note is written. Please leave personal details out of that note, since anyone reading the report will see it.

Your rights

Because residents have no profile, there is no personal record to retrieve, correct, or erase. A pharmacy or staff member whose number is on file can ask the project team to correct or remove it at any time.

This design follows the Data Privacy Act of 2012 (RA 10173): personal data is minimised by construction rather than promised in a policy.