BrazilHealthcare and life sciences2017 – ongoingNoHarm
AI prescription screening for hospital and clinic pharmacists
A Brazilian non-profit's prescription-checking AI reached more than 200 health units and lets a lone Amazon pharmacist clear four times as many prescriptions
Problem
Brazilian pharmacists often review hundreds of prescriptions a day, which makes dosage errors, dangerous drug interactions and conflicts with a patient's conditions easy to miss. In remote towns a single pharmacist may serve an entire municipality.
Approach
Pharmacist Ana Helena Ulbrich and her brother, data scientist Henrique Dias, founded NoHarm in Porto Alegre in 2017. Its open-source models, first developed with Porto Alegre hospitals and trained on anonymised prescriptions and patient records, screen prescriptions in batches, flag possible overdoses and interactions with a link to the supporting source, and rank prescriptions by risk; pharmacists make the final call and can override alerts. Private hospitals pay a fee, while public SUS facilities use it free, with grants and cloud credits from Google, Amazon and others.
Results
Takeaway
Charging private hospitals to fund free use in public clinics let a small organisation spread across the public system. Its models were trained mostly on data from southern Brazil, and the founders acknowledge they may miss tropical diseases common in the Amazon towns it now serves.
Categories
- Size
- Small business
- Industry
- Healthcare and life sciences
- Business function
- Production and quality
- Innovation type
- Product and service innovationBusiness model innovation
- AI technology
- Predictive analytics and ML
- Adoption
- Built in-house
- Evidence
- Press reporting
Sources
Source summaries
Rest of World reports from Caracaraí, a town of about 22,000, on the area's only pharmacist, who began using NoHarm in April 2025 and says it roughly quadrupled his capacity and caught more than 50 errors. It says about 20 cities in Brazil's poorest regions have started using the tool. It also covers unreliable internet, the short track record in the Amazon and the risk of "disease bias" from training data drawn from southern hospitals.
TIME reports that Ulbrich founded the non-profit with her brother in 2017 and that pharmacists review every flag and can override the tool. It reports use in more than 200 Brazilian hospitals, clinics and health centres, about five million prescriptions reviewed a month and reach that has roughly doubled every year since 2019. Public facilities use it free and private hospitals pay a small fee.
NoHarm reports more than 200 health units, more than 175 million prescriptions evaluated and more than five million lives affected. It describes the features, including clinical-text analysis, dose-per-kilogram checks, interaction alerts and risk-based prioritisation, and states that the service is free for the public health system. It cites hospital results such as R$2 million saved over two years at Santa Casa BH.
Full details are in the original sources.
