TFDA Drug Info Search (TFDA 藥品資訊查詢系統)

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Architecture Summary

A serverless, purely static single-page application (SPA). GitHub Actions periodically runs a Python data-processing script that pulls raw open data from the Taiwan Food and Drug Administration (TFDA), pre-fetches and cleanses it, and generates a lightweight static JSON cache. This architecture removes the physical limits of calling government APIs directly from the frontend — CORS restrictions, high network latency and browser out-of-memory (OOM) — and delivers millisecond-level client-side search. The interface is in Traditional Chinese.

Frontend Features

Designed around the lookup pain points of clinical staff and the public, the frontend offers these engineering and UX advantages:

• 🚀 Millisecond search (in-memory): No API round trips. When the page loads, the lightweight JSON is cached locally, and all Chinese/English fuzzy searches complete instantly in memory — results appear as you type, with zero latency.

• 🔎 Name / ingredient / ATC search scope: Besides Chinese and English product names, you can switch to searching by ingredient, matched directly against the raw ingredients field, so AMLODIPINE also matches AMLODIPINE (AS BESYLATE). This covers brand names that don't contain the ingredient string (e.g. 「脈優」), and ingredient search returns a notably larger result set than name search. The default stays on "name" so that combination products of common ingredients such as ACETAMINOPHEN don't dilute name results.

• 🏷️ ATC code search: Prefix match against NHI ATC codes, for both finding a drug class and exact lookup: C09 lists the whole RAS class, while C09CA01 lists only losartan. Results come with an ATC group summary table (code / ingredient / product count); clicking a code narrows the cards to that group, so a whole class is visible despite the 30-card limit. Limitations:

  • ATC codes come only from NHI data, so non-NHI products can't be found by ATC. A fixed notice above the results says so.
  • Products whose NHI code stops at a broader level (e.g. only N07CA) are not included in deeper queries — they may be a different drug in the same class. Only their count is shown.
  • The "all" scope deliberately does not include ATC matching.

  See docs/plan-atc-search.md.

• 🌐 US prescription label reference (openFDA): A collapsible section in each drug card. It matches openFDA US prescription drug labels by ingredient and route, and shows the verbatim Boxed Warning, pregnancy and lactation text of a representative label (NDA/BLA innovator labels first), with a DailyMed link.

  • Matching is deliberately strict: counter-ion salts and hydrates are treated as equivalent, while esters and prodrugs are kept distinct; combination products must match the exact ingredient set.
  • It only makes positive statements: about 30% of current US Rx labels lack structured openFDA fields, so "no Boxed Warning found" does not mean there is none.
  • A fixed notice at the top states that this is not the Taiwan-approved information for the product.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗