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.

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.