AskRx

Inspiration

In Singapore’s psychiatric care settings, medication adherence is a persistent challenge. Patients often struggle with remembering, understanding, or following through with their prescriptions, which leads to poor outcomes and relapses. Traditional one-off counselling sessions, while well-intentioned, often fail to sustain adherence and result in poor long-term outcomes. At the same time, pharmacists and doctors face rising caseloads and administrative burdens, leaving less time for personalized patient support.

We were inspired to design AskRx to close this gap by bringing trusted, real-time, human-like medication guidance directly into the digital spaces patients already use, such as Telegram. Co-designed by pharmacists and doctors and shaped through customer discovery at key hospital institutions in Singapore, AskRx is built to empower patients with continuous, accessible support while easing the burden on clinicians.

What it does

AskRx is an AI copilot designed by pharmacists and doctors to transform everyday messaging platforms into real-time medication companions.

• Patients can ask questions about prescriptions, side effects, and daily routines and receive clinically validated guidance.
• Offers mental health support prompts to encourage adherence and emotional wellbeing in psychiatric care.
• Includes a personalized medication diary, helping patients keep track of doses, timings, and refills.
• Enables pharmacovigilance by monitoring for adverse drug reactions and automatically flagging potential safety issues.
• Provides clinicians with adherence analytics, surfacing patient risks and trends while reducing repetitive queries.

How we built it

• Primary language: JavaScript, with the React library powering the front-end for a clean, modular, and responsive interface.
• AI core: Used LLM-driven natural language processing fine-tuned for psychiatric medication scenarios to ensure both clinical accuracy and empathetic tone.
• Clinical knowledge base: Designed in collaboration with pharmacists, doctors and existing evidence-based libraries from HealthHub and Ministry of Health agencies to ground responses in safe, evidence-based practices.
• Plug-and-play integration: Built a flexible integration layer that connects with existing messaging platforms (starting with Telegram) without disrupting workflows.
• Data layer: Embedded adherence tracking, medication diary, mental health support prompts, and pharmacovigilance features for safety monitoring and real-time analytics.

Challenges we ran into

• Clinical accuracy vs. conversational tone: striking the balance between being medically precise and empathetic enough for psychiatric settings was a major design challenge.
• Data privacy and security: ensuring sensitive psychiatric and medication data remain protected, compliance to SingPass authentication requirements while enabling real-time conversational support.
• Integration hurdles (ongoing issue): making AskRx truly “plug-and-play” with platforms like Telegram without disrupting clinical workflows required custom bridging logic.
• Trust and adoption: patients needed to feel safe relying on AI for mental health and medication guidance, while clinicians needed assurance that AskRx would support, not replace their role.
• Regulatory compliance: navigating Singapore’s healthcare standards and considering pathways toward digital therapeutic certification added extra complexity.
• Multimodal needs: capturing not just medication adherence but also mental health support, diary logging, and pharmacovigilance meant designing beyond Q&A into a holistic care ecosystem.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Developed a proof-of-concept prototype showcasing how AskRx can deliver safe, real-time psychiatric medication support.
• Built a clinically validated knowledge base, co-designed with pharmacists and doctors.
• Designed key features beyond Q&: including mental health support prompts, a medication diary, and pharmacovigilance pathways.
• Created a plug-and-play integration plan to bring AskRx into familiar platforms like Telegram, making adoption seamless in the future.
• Established a clear roadmap for regulatory, clinical, and technical validation in Singapore’s healthcare context.

What we learned

• Patients are more likely to adopt tools embedded in familiar messaging platforms than in standalone apps.
• In psychiatric care, tone and empathy are as important as accuracy.
• Clinicians see AskRx as valuable when it acts as a copilot, not a replacement.
• Building for healthcare means data privacy, regulation, and safety must be designed in from day one.
• Expanding scope to include adherence tracking, diaries, and pharmacovigilance increases clinical trust.

What's next for AskRx

• Build and test the Telegram integration layer, making AskRx truly plug-and-play.
• Expand into other messaging ecosystems and hospital portals.
• Pilot AskRx with hospitals and clinics in Singapore, starting with small-scale feasibility studies.
• Introduce automated medication refilling to improve adherence and reduce call load on refill requests:
• Use API integrations with national systems (e.g., NHIPS, NGEMR) to automatically place refill orders and trigger dispensing. Where full automation isn’t possible, AskRx will flag upcoming refills to healthcare providers via EHR platforms (e.g., Epic) so clinicians or pharmacists can take action promptly.
• Add multilingual support to serve Singapore’s diverse communities.
• Work toward regulatory clearance as a digital therapeutic to ensure safety and compliance.
• Partner with healthcare providers to scale AskRx across Southeast Asia.

Built With

• javascript
• react