The experience of going to a pharmacy sucks, and is obsolete. The entire medical industry is complacent in allowing 100 billion in unnecessary medical costs because of non-adherence to medications. The doctors don't consider it their job to make their patients adhere. The pharmacist maybe talks to you for a few minutes and hands you a sheet of medical and legal jargon that says, on page 3, how important it is to take medicine. The drug companies also fail to ensure adherence. Yet patients don't know enough to care.
None of these people have stepped up to the plate. So we're gonna do it, and when we solve the problem, we can start upending all the parts of the patient facing medical experience where bad decisions and stupid compromises have been calcified into the shitty experience that anyone who has had a sick family member knows all to well.
We are not exactly a web start up though. We must design some actual stuff people will use too. The computer science part of our project is that all this adherence stuff can actually reduce to a flow of information problem given a few assumptions and the right way of conceptualizing the problem from a psychological and brain science standpoint. The computer science forms the informational backbone along which we can build a medical experience that doesn't suck and isn't full of compromises that suck for the patient. From a computer science point of view, we are applying existing techniques to a new problem, but from the point of view of the medical establishment, we are solving a currently unsolved problem of huge proportions.
Information about your medication is some of the most important information you encounter, because it directly influences how long you live and how well you live. Edward Tufte is an old man now, and the pharmacies are still basically acting like it's 1952 in the way they present this vital information.