How to fit a pharmacist in your pocket
Evincii releases a new app that walks consumers through symptoms, allergies, and side effects to help choose the best medicine on the shelves of participating pharmacies.
If you're the kind of person who feels bewildered in a pharmacy, here's a free app to test drive.
Evincii's new Pickka Med app is designed to function like an "expert pharmacist in your pocket," where people are able not only to search by phone for the best over-the-counter FDA-approved medicine in any given participating pharmacy but in the process avoid touching all the germ-addled bottles lining the shelves of the one place where sick people invariably shop.
Previously, Silicon Valley-based Evincii installed kiosks at hundreds of retail stores, providing guided-search technology to help shoppers find the right meds. But the cost to build, deliver, and install was steep, and didn't solve the problem of all that germ-sharing on the touch pad.
This new deployment over mobile phones puts the technology in people's pockets, so you don't have to search online before you go, or via the small screen and keyboard of a smartphone. It comes with the added benefit of the most up-to-date information regarding outbreaks, recalls, etc.
"We update very diligently," says Evincii CEO Charlie Koo, who first thought up this technology while sifting through countless confusing bottles and labels when his children had the cold. "Case in point: a year ago, FDA announced all the cold medicines to be removed from over-the-counter. Within 12 hours after the news release, we'd already removed everything."
Koo says the app will eventually include Vitamin supplements and homeopathic remedies.
Pickka is available at for iPhones and for all BlackBerry and Android phones.