Want generic drugs? Now there’s an app for that thanks to Brown medical student

PROVIDENCE – Say you’re a doctor, and you have an uninsured patient who needs cholesterol medication but can’t afford to spend $50 or $100 a month on it. Or you’re helping a young woman who wants birth control, and she can’t subsist on freebies from your sample cabinet.

You know generic drugs are the key, but even they can be expensive. How do you find the good deals?

Now there’s an iPhone app for that – and it’s available for free in the App Store.

Scott Guelich, a former computer programmer who is now preparing to enter his fourth (and final) year at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School, planning to go into emergency medicine, developed the application as a community health project and released it June 15.

He was inspired, he said, by his encounters with patients during a family medicine rotation at Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island.

“There were a lot of patients who were out of work or didn’t have insurance, and they weren’t taking medications that they needed because they couldn’t afford them,” he said. “And everybody seems to know about the $4 Walmart plan, but they’re not the only plan that’s out there.”

All the major pharmacies at this point have some kind of bargain-priced generics program, Guelich said, and for a lot of the patients at Memorial, who didn’t have cars, going to Walmart on Silver Spring Street in Providence was too difficult.

So Guelich set out to make it easier for the doctors and residents at Memorial to figure out which generic drugs were available for cheap at each of the major pharmacy chains, including ones with stores nearby, such as CVS/pharmacy and Walgreens.

If you’ve ever delved into these programs, you can imagine how much work that turned out to be. Most of the chains just offer the lists as PDFs, and the particular way in which they provide the information varies from chain to chain.

Some, Guelich noted, list all the brand names that the generics replace; others just list the generic name. The doses available for $4 per month may vary; some drugs may be more expensive, but still substantially cheaper than the typical prices for that drug class.

“The vast majority of the work was putting the data into a database,” Guelich said. “I had done an iPhone app in the past, so wrapping it up into an iPhone app wasn’t that hard – I knew that part. But the most time-consuming part was getting it entered, and reconciling all the differences between the lists.”

Guelich managed to parse some of the data, but a lot, he said, he could only do manually. He also added some extra features, so along with browsing by drug name or by pharmacy, the app allows a doctor to pull up drugs by class – so all the cardiovascular drugs, for example, and then within them, the statins, the beta blockers, the calcium channel blockers, etc.

One happy discovery, Guelich said, was that “a lot” of drugs are available through these programs, especially for chronic conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure.

“Your bread-and-butter drugs really are covered,” he said. Some people may need specialized drugs or have adverse reactions to the basic drugs, he noted, so “I didn’t think the lists would be terribly helpful. But I was surprised by how many of them were the vast majority of the drugs that our patients were taking.”

Already, he has seen real-life patients benefit. A 58-year-old woman who came into the Memorial clinic, for example, was uninsured and had stopped taking six medications she needed to control diabetes, high blood pressure and other conditions, and she came in with extremely high blood pressure. One was over-the-counter iron pills; the other five, Guelich found, were all on the bargain generics lists – and she just didn’t know it.

“It was kind of an eye-opening example,” he said.

Guelich is still working on improvements to the app, such as a way to look up drugs by class within each pharmacy. But already, by publicizing the app through the medical school network, he’d had more than 2,200 downloads as of early last week.

“And hundreds more have been downloading it each day,” he said, “so hopefully it will continue to be popular.”

For people working in hospitals or in other settings where pagers are widely used, Guelich has another app available as well – this one for $2.99, though he offered it for free for a couple of days this month. It allows iPhone users to send text messages to pagers, instead of having to call and punch in a call-back number. It’s also available in the App Store.