Summary

Add support for importing medications by scanning the barcode or entering the PZN (Pharmazentralnummer) — the pharmaceutical product number printed on every drug package in Germany — with EAN as a fallback where available. Bevel would look the product up automatically and store its details in dedicated, structured fields, so medications are tracked properly instead of as free-text entries or custom recipes.

The problem today

Right now I can only add a medication manually, and there's no proper place for the pharmaceutical information. The active ingredients and dosage end up crammed into the product title or a custom recipe, which makes tracking inconsistent and hard to search or analyze later.

What I'd like it to do

Scan the barcode / enter the PZN (or EAN) → Bevel resolves the medication automatically.

Store and display it in dedicated fields:

Product name, manufacturer, pack size

Active substances (Wirkstoffe) with strength per unit

Dosage form (tablet, capsule, drops, …)

Excipients / other ingredients

Dosage / intake instructions

Make active substances searchable and analyzable across my log, so I can see exactly what I've taken and when — and keep a reliable record to share with a doctor.

Why this matters

Many people take medications daily for chronic conditions. Proper, structured product support with barcode/PZN import would make tracking far more accurate and much less tedious than typing everything by hand — and it lays the groundwork for safety features later (e.g. flagging interactions between active ingredients).

Where the data could come from

Medication data in Germany is well standardized around the PZN, so there are concrete sources to pull from:

IFA GmbH (Informationsstelle für Arzneispezialitäten) — assigns and maintains the PZN and the base article master data (name, PZN, pack size, manufacturer). This is the authoritative barcode/PZN registry.

ABDATA Pharma-Daten-Service (Avoxa / ABDA) — the "ABDA database," the reference drug knowledge base used by virtually all German pharmacy software: composition, active ingredients, dosage, and interaction/safety data. Licensed to organizations per module.

ifap and MMI / Gelbe Liste (PHARMINDEX) — commercial drug-data providers offering comparable structured medication data with APIs.

BfArM / PharmNet.Bund (AMIce) — the regulator's Arzneimittel-Informationssystem, with a free public portion covering approved products and active substances.

pharmazie.com — an aggregation platform exposing a REST API over much of the above (paid, from roughly EUR 135/month).

For users outside Germany, the same flow could fall back to EAN plus a general drug-data API, keeping PZN as the primary path for the German market.

Planning note: the richest data (active ingredients, dosage — from ABDATA / ifap / MMI) is commercially licensed, so this likely needs a data-provider partnership rather than a free public API. IFA (the PZN registry) and BfArM (public data) are the lower-cost entry points if a full license isn't feasible at first.

Use case

I take several prescription medications every day for health reasons. Ideally I'd just scan the barcode or type in the PZN, and Bevel would import the medication together with its active ingredients and dosage into proper structured fields — so it's tracked correctly and stays searchable, instead of living in a title string or a custom recipe.

As someone who takes several supplements and medications every day for health reasons, I would love to see better support for tracking these products in Bevel.

Currently, it is possible to add products manually, but ingredient information is not properly structured and often has to be entered in the title or as a custom recipe. This makes tracking difficult and inconsistent.

Feature request:

Allow users to import supplements and medications using a PZN (Pharmazentralnummer) or EAN.

Automatically retrieve product information from a database.

Display the product similarly to food items, including:

Ingredients

Active substances

Vitamins and minerals

Nutritional information (where applicable)

Dosage information

Store and display these details in dedicated fields instead of requiring users to create custom recipes and manually enter ingredients.

Make ingredients and nutrients searchable and analyzable within the app.

Why this would be useful: Many users regularly take supplements, vitamins, minerals, and medications. Having proper product support with barcode/PZN import would make tracking much easier, reduce manual data entry, and provide more accurate insights into total nutrient intake.

This would greatly improve Bevel for users managing chronic health conditions and those who closely monitor their supplementation and nutrition.

Use case: I take multiple supplements and prescription medications daily. Ideally, I could simply scan the barcode or enter the PZN number, and Bevel would automatically import the product along with its ingredients and nutritional information. This would allow supplements to be tracked properly instead of only being added as text entries or custom recipes.

👍 This would make Bevel a much more powerful health and nutrition tracking platform.

Iron can be defined as nutritional goals but we should also be able to monitor the intake of iron supplements in the same way as magnesium and vitamins in our journal.

I’ve been taking NMN, TMG, NAC, CoQ10. It would be nice if these metrics will he added in nutrition similar to NetDiary. Bevel AI can also help analyzing correlation of taking these supplements with over all health i.e stress, sleep efficiency, etc.