A few months ago, we received what seemed like a routine consulting brief. Lowe Lintas needed help with a digital health project. Little did we know this project would end up winning a Silver Lion at Cannes 2025.
Today, we’re thrilled to announce that Digital Rhetoric helped develop DawAI Reader, the AI solution that just became India’s first Pharma Silver Lion winner this year.
The brief was simple: help create an AI app that could decode illegible prescriptions for rural pharmacies. But the reality was staggering. 4 out of 5 prescriptions in rural India are illegible. Every year, 5.8 million people die from medical errors in India, many from misread prescriptions. With one trained chemist for every 4,000 people, illegible handwriting isn’t just inconvenient, it’s deadly.
As consultants, our job was to help shape this into a solution that could truly serve its purpose. We weren’t just building another app, we were creating a lifeline for rural healthcare.
DawAI Reader became something beautiful: an AI companion that sits in rural pharmacies, scanning impossible-to-read prescriptions, decoding drug names and dosages, then reading them aloud in local languages. It’s like giving every village chemist a medical translator who never gets tired.
The technology is fascinating: custom OCR trained on doctors’ handwriting, fuzzy logic for medical shorthand, and a verified drug database for accuracy. But what made this special was positioning it not as a replacement for human expertise, but as an empowerment tool.
The pilot reached 100,000 families across 250 villages. That’s 100,000 families with safer access to their medications.
This is India’s first Pharma Silver Lion this year. DawAI Reader competed globally and won not with flashy creativity, but with genuine innovation solving real problems.
What truly makes us proud is knowing that somewhere in rural India, a village chemist feels more confident reading prescriptions, and families sleep better knowing their medications are correct.
To Alkem Laboratories and Lowe Lintas, thank you for trusting Digital Rhetoric with this incredible project. We proved that meaningful work wins, every time.
What purpose-driven projects are you working on? We’d love to connect and hear your stories.
