About Medicheck
Medicheck reads a medicine strip on your phone and checks it against public government data. This page lists where the data comes from, how well Medicheck works, and what happens to your information.
Where the data comes from
Medicheck refreshes these lists automatically on the 5th of every month. If a list changes too much at once, the refresh stops and the old list stays, so a broken download never replaces good data.
Jan Aushadhi product and MRP list
Pharmaceuticals & Medical Devices Bureau of India (PMBI), Government of India
Cheaper generic and its price.
Last refreshed by Medicheck: 25 October 2026, 1,627 entries
Open the sourceJan Aushadhi Kendra list
PMBI, Government of India
Nearest Kendras. Where the official map position fails our checks, the address is located with OpenStreetMap's Nominatim instead, and the app says so.
Last refreshed by Medicheck: 25 October 2026, 21,560 entries
Open the sourceDrug alerts: Not of Standard Quality and spurious drugs
Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO)
Batch safety. An alert applies only to the batch that was tested.
Last refreshed by Medicheck: 25 October 2026, 6,882 entries
Open the sourceProhibited fixed-dose combinations
CDSCO (Gazette notifications), including court stays and revocations
Banned combination check.
Last refreshed by Medicheck: 25 October 2026, 687 entries
Open the sourceCeiling prices, orders S.O. 1575(E) and S.O. 1581(E), in force from 1 April 2026
National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA)
Fair price. Ceiling prices exclude GST. Updated once a year, when NPPA publishes the April revision.
Last refreshed by Medicheck: 25 October 2026, 696 entries
Open the sourceA-Z Medicine Dataset of India
Shudhanshu Singh, on Kaggle. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. Snapshot of November 2022.
Brand names, makers and ingredients, to recognise your medicine. Prices in it are from 2022, so Medicheck asks you for the MRP on your strip. The brand tables Medicheck builds from it are shared under the same licence.
Last refreshed by Medicheck: 25 October 2026, 2,41,046 entries
Open the sourceOpenStreetMap
© OpenStreetMap contributors. Licence: ODbL.
The map of Kendras, and locating some Kendra addresses.
Open the source
How well it works
These numbers come from Medicheck's own evaluation, which runs the same code as the app. A wrong answer counts as worse than no answer, so we report both.
Finding the right medicine
207 strips made from real brands with typical reading mistakes, never used while tuning Medicheck. In 1 of 4 the brand is not in our list, so the right answer is “not sure”. Measured on 25 October 2026.
| Method | Right first choice | Wrong answers | Right in top 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Exact name only | 63% | 3% | 63% |
| Similar names (trigram search), always answers | 81% | 31% | 91% |
| + checks ingredients, strength and form, always answers | 86% | 26% | 90% |
| Medicheck: + says “not sure” when unsure | 86% | 3% | 90% |
“Wrong answers” is the share of answers given that named the wrong medicine. Saying “not sure” keeps it low: you are then asked to pick from a short list or type the name. Made-up strips are easier than real photos, so expect real results to be lower.
Reading the strip
Measured on 3 test photos that were never looked at while building Medicheck, on 25 October 2026.
| Medicheck | Plain OCR | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| What is read | Right | Wrong | Right |
| Medicine name | 0/3 | 1/3 | 0/3 |
| Ingredients | 0/2 | 2/2 | 0/2 |
| How many in the strip | 0/2 | 0/2 | 1/2 |
| Batch number | 0/1 | 0/1 | 0/1 |
| Expiry | 0/1 | 0/1 | 0/1 |
“Plain OCR” is Tesseract on the untouched photo. Medicheck first straightens the photo, evens out the light and removes foil glare. A field neither right nor wrong was left empty for you to fill in.
Reading time per strip on a laptop: 3.4 s typical, 3.8 s for the slowest 1 in 20. Phones are slower; the confirm screen shows the time on yours.
Your privacy
- Your photos are read on your phone and never uploaded.
- Your location is used only on your phone, to sort Kendras by distance; it is never sent to Medicheck. The phone downloads the Kendra list for its area (squares about 150 km wide), so at most that rough area can be seen. If you tap “Show on map”, map pictures for that area come from OpenStreetMap.
- When you tap “Find a cheaper generic”, the medicine details you confirmed (name, ingredients, batch number, MRP) go to Medicheck's server to search the lists. They are not stored and not written to logs.
- No accounts, no cookies, no ads, no analytics. The large-text setting is saved only in your browser.
The code is open, so anyone can check this: github.com/ayushanupam32-pixel/medicheck
Medical safety
- Medicheck gives information, not medical advice. It never tells you to stop or change a medicine: show the result to your pharmacist or doctor.
- A generic is shown only when its ingredients, strengths, form and release type are exactly the same as your medicine's.
- When Medicheck is not sure, it says so instead of guessing.
- Government lists can be late or incomplete. “Nothing found” means not on the lists we checked, not a guarantee.