Built on Ghana’s public FDA register
Is this medicine registered?
MedVerify looks a medicine up in the Food and Drugs Authority’s register and tells you its registration status, along with everything the official record holds about it.
Search by name, scan the barcode, or — when the pack gives you neither — hand it whatever details you can read and let it weigh them together.
- Free
- No account, no sign-up
- No phone number
Why it matters
Trust is doing all the work
Medicine gets sold from trotros, from trays at the roadside, from doors knocked on in the afternoon, and from television slots that never asked to see an approval certificate. In 2023, reporters registered an invented company and had eight media houses accept a mixture of soft drinks for advertisement as a cure for infertility — no FDA certificate requested. People called in wanting to buy it.
The register that would settle the question is public, and has never been easy to search from a shop counter.
What is usually missing at the moment of purchase is not scepticism. It is a way to check.
Across sub-Saharan Africa, falsified anti-malarials are estimated to be linked to around 267,000 deaths a year.
Substandard antibiotics are a primary driver of antimicrobial resistance.
How to check
Two ways to ask
Which one you need depends on how much the pack in your hand is willing to tell you.
Quick search
You can read the name, the registration number, or scan the barcode.
Type the product name — spelling does not have to be exact — or the FDA registration number, or point the camera at the barcode. You get the register entry straight back: its status, who holds the registration, and what the record says about it.
Multi-evidence verification
The pack gives you neither a clean name nor a barcode.
Hand it whatever the packaging does show — manufacturer, active ingredient, strength, dosage form, part of a name — and it weighs every detail against the register together. The answer comes back as a confidence score with each piece of evidence listed, including the ones that only half-matched.
Coming: reading the pack for you. Photographing the packaging and pulling the details off it automatically is in progress. Today you enter them.
Checks you have already run are kept on the phone, so they still answer in a shop with no reception. A product the app has never seen needs a connection.
Limits
What a check does not tell you
Worth knowing before you rely on one.
- 01
It checks registration, not authenticity
MedVerify tells you whether a product is registered with the FDA and what that registration says. It is not a counterfeit test. It cannot look inside the box, and a registered product name on a pack does not prove the pack is what it claims to be.
- 02
It cannot see a substandard medicine
A properly registered drug that has degraded — stored in the heat, kept past its usefulness — still matches the register perfectly. Unless a batch has been officially recalled and the record updated, nothing about that shows up in a check.
- 03
It is only as current as the FDA record
Everything comes from the Authority’s published register. MedVerify re-reads it every night, but if the official record is out of date or incomplete, the answer inherits that. It adds transparency; it does not replace the regulator.
- 04
It never asks who you are
No account, no email address, no phone number. Your phone identifies itself with a key it generates on first launch and keeps to itself. We cannot tell you apart from anyone else, and we cannot see what you looked up.
An example
What the app reports back
| Detail given | Against the register | Score |
|---|---|---|
| BarcodeNot provided | Not counted | Not scored; weight 45 |
| Registration numberNot provided | Not counted | Not scored; weight 45 |
| ManufacturerAlcon-Couvreur N.V. | Matched | 15/15 |
| Active ingredientOlopatadine HCl | Matched | 15/15 |
| Generic nameOlopatadine | Matched | 10/10 |
| Product name“Patanol” | Similar match | 6/8 |
| Strength1 mg/mL | Matched | 5/5 |
| Dosage formEye drops | Matched | 5/5 |
Registered as FDA/SD.233-121617, held by Alcon-Couvreur N.V. Details you could not supply are left out of the score rather than counted against you.
An example, to show the shape of what the app reports back.
Contribute
The register has gaps. You can close them.
The official record lists what was approved. It does not always carry the barcode on the box, a photograph of the packaging, or the wording from the insert — and those are exactly the things a phone has to match against.
Pharmacists, dispensers and anyone with a medicine cabinet can add them through the Data Handler.
What we need
- Photographs of the pack
- The barcode
- The registration number
- What it treats
- Known side effects
- The rest of the label
FAQ
Questions people ask
Written for someone standing in a shop deciding whether to buy something. If yours isn’t here, write to us.
Whether a product is registered with Ghana’s Food and Drugs Authority, and what the register says about it — its status, who holds the registration, the manufacturer, the ingredient, the dates. That is a question about the paperwork behind a product, not about the contents of the box in front of you.
No, and it will not claim to. A counterfeit can carry a real registration number copied off a genuine pack, and it will check out. What MedVerify can tell you is that a product is not registered at all, or that its registration is not what the pack says — both of which are good reasons to stop and ask a pharmacist.
When the pack will not give you a clean name or a scannable barcode. Search is faster when you have either. Multi-evidence exists for the rest of the time: you enter whatever is legible — manufacturer, active ingredient, strength, dosage form, part of a name — and it weighs them together.
How much of what you provided lines up with a single entry in the register, weighted by how telling each detail is. A registration number or a barcode counts for far more than a strength or a dosage form, because those repeat across many products. Details you could not supply are left out of the score rather than counted against you.
No. MedVerify is independent. It reads the Authority’s published register, but the FDA does not run it, endorse it, or check its answers. Anything the app tells you is our reading of a public record, not a ruling from the regulator.
Your phone generates a private key on first launch and keeps it. It uses that key to prove requests are genuine, which is what lets us run this without accounts. We hold no name, email or phone number, and nothing links a lookup back to a person.
Only if you turn that on, and only at the moment of a check. It records a region — Greater Accra, Ashanti — never a precise position, so that a cluster of unregistered products turning up in one part of the country becomes visible. The app works fully with it switched off.
It is re-read every night. Between the FDA publishing a change and the app seeing it, expect about a day.