Take Your Medicine: Using Mobile Apps to Help With Medication Adherence

According to a Drug Trend Report issued by Express Scripts in 2012, eliminating medication non-adherence could save the U.S. $317.4 billion in health care costs every year. However, according to polls, about two-thirds of Americans either don’t take their medications or fail to consistently take them as prescribed. Experts estimate a patient may die every 90 minutes because of a missed medication dosage or an accidental overdose.

As health care recruiters look toward the future of hospital administration, they’re looking for technology-savvy professionals who have a vision for improving patient engagement through technology.

Many practitioners are encouraging patients to use mobile apps to help with medication adherence. If this type of work excites you, then you can visit here to learn more. Both anecdotal and scientific evidence shows mobile devices and mobile apps can help patients to stick to their prescription regimens.

What Makes a Medication Adherence App Effective?

Methods for improving a patient’s prescription-taking habits usually fall into one of three categories:

Behavioral - Some traditional methods consist of tools like counseling, reminders and reinforcement to improve adherence. However, telephone, pager or audiovisual device reminders tended to be impractical.

Educational - Studies have shown patient education can be a powerful tool for adherence, particularly for patients who take six or more medications. Combining patient education with triggers that encourage them to take medications can be the most effective way to improve pill-taking habits.

Organizational - Organizational interventions try to remove barriers to both adherence and communication with providers. These techniques have given birth to weekly pillboxes, packaged calendars and other types of unit-of-use packaging. Unfortunately, reminder systems become complicated when a patient takes several different medications.

Mobile apps solve the inconvenience of setting up telephone or pager reminders for taking medication. By providing high-quality content in addition to simple reminders, they can be useful tools for patient education. Also, patients can defeat organizational problems related to complex regimens by setting up their prescription information in a mobile app.

Since adherence data collected in a mobile app can often be shared with a provider, patients experience fewer communication barriers between them and their doctors.

What Are Some of the Best Apps on the Market Today?

In astudy recently published by the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association, a group of researchers evaluated 160 mobile medication adherence apps for compliance, cloud data storage, online data entry, multilingual capabilities and other desirable features.

After narrowing their list down to the top 10 apps for Android, iOS and BlackBerry, two of researchers installed those apps and tested their real functionality against . Three apps demonstrated excellent results:

MyMedSchedule

MyMedSchedule, available for both Android and iOS devices, allows patients to input medication routines online and then push the regimen to a patient’s mobile device. The app reminds patients about taking their medications and stores all data in a HIPAA-compliant cloud. Doctors can push both educational material and any regimen changes to the patient thanks to the cloud.

MyMeds

For a fee of $5.99 per year, patients can enter their medication data both online and through a mobile app. Both taken and missed doses are pushed back to physicians for review. Both patients and providers can take advantage of an extensive medication database within the app. MyMeds can be downloaded from Apple’s App Store and Google Play.

RxmindMe

RxmindMe, like MyMeds, features an exhaustive database covering different medications. It also exports patient adherence data back to physicians for review. Like the other two apps, it also provided patients with reminders to take medications on schedule. RxmindMe is available for iOS devices in the App Store.

A World of Potential

Currently, 55 percent of American adults own a smartphone — and that percentage is growing. Although smartphone ownership skews toward younger adults, a significant number of elderly patients own smartphones as well. Apps cost very little for patients, and they could generate billions of dollars in health care savings.

Doctors and pharmacists should learn more about their mobile options, and hospital administrators should spark initiatives that encourage staff to incorporate mobile into their patient care strategies.