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This repository was archived by the owner on May 18, 2026. It is now read-only.
Andrew Kesterson edited this page Oct 19, 2013 · 12 revisions

Flow Diagram

Drug Database Info

The FDA maintains a very nice database of all drugs licensed in the United States. It is updated every monday, and they even document the file format. AWESOME.

http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/InformationOnDrugs/ucm142438.htm

DrugBank also has a very good database of drug information, complete with information on what each drug is used to treat. The FDA database is more official, but it lacks this contextual information. The DrugBank data is legit, even if the website does look janky.

http://www.drugbank.ca/downloads

Pharmacy Verification

Each state has its own pharmacy registration & verification system; I reached out to the NABP to see if there was any service that could simplify it to verify pharmacies for all 50 states:

http://www.nabp.net/resources

Database

We will be using PostgreSQL for this project because all of our data will be very well formatted, and we can make SQL ridiculously fast with this kind of data. Also because postgres has fantastic support for high availability and replication. Unfortunately this precludes us growing into AWS RDS, but frankly RDS is just a fancy wrapper around EC2 instances anyway.

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/high-availability.html

Regardless there are apparently some best practices for using Postgres in AWS, even without RDS, so we should consider that. This service, if successful, will grow to large boundaries so we should consider scaling it into a provider like AWS.

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/07/running-postgresql-on-aws.html

External APIs

Paypal: https://developer.paypal.com/

Amazon FPS : http://aws.amazon.com/fps/#highlights1

Google Wallet : https://developers.google.com/commerce/wallet/

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