Pharm-AI: An Intelligent Chatbot for Addressing Medication Accessibility and Information Challenges During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic was the cause of the shortage of medicines, the spread of misinformation and the creation of obstacles to the accessibility of the health care system. Therefore, patients got a lot of fake claims about drug interactions, side effects, and availability. For the purposes of addressing these issues, Pharm-AI, an AI-powered chatbot, has been invented to give the patients the right and real-time information about the medicines they need, to help them find the nearest pharmacies, and to clarify any medication-related questions. Pharm-AI uses natural language processing with geolocation mapping to improve healthcare accessibility and decision-making. It uses data from very reliable sources such as PubMed, Scopus, Drug Central, and clinical trials to give evidence-based responses and thus to lower misinformation risks.Some preliminary analyses have demonstrated that Pharm-AI is a very successful tool in the fight against information overload that allows users to get sound drug-related insights very quickly. Its geolocation element provides the data needed to identify the pharmacies where the medicine is available. This results in a 65% decrease in the time needed to locate medications as compared to manual searches. Moreover, Pharm-AI helps people save money especially in the low-income regions by comparing the prices of generic and branded drugs and so, it stimulates the transparency of the costs. One of the weaknesses for example is the platform might have to depend on third party pharmaceutical companies’ inventories and the use of certain languages in regional dialects which are affective limitations. The new solutions will involve using optical character recognition (OCR) for prescription analysis, multilingual support, and affiliating with online pharmacies for automated medication delivery. Pharm-AI is a step forward in the development of AI-driven healthcare solutions, so it is going to make the health care system better and the information about the drugs more reliable.