Thursday, October 2, 2008

Helpful Reminders for Taking Your Medications





It's easy to forget to take your medications and forgetfullness is one cause of the lack of medication adherence. Below are some tips for remembering to take medications. This came from an article regarding thyroid medication, but these helpful tips can be used in any situation and might prove to be helpful teaching tools for patients who have a hard time remembering to take their drugs regularly.

Helpful tips for remembering to take medications:

1. Write it in your datebook. Write it in a special color that is hard to miss.

2. Since you're reading this on a computer, consider putting your reminder in your computer's scheduling program. Some programs allow you to set a regular daily "appointment" at a particular time. Some even have an alarm function that you can set.

3.Put a message on your computer's screen saver.

4. Keep your pill container right on top of your alarm clock, so you can remember to take your medicine first thing in the morning. (But be careful to keep your medications away from children.)

5. Put a note wherever you'll notice it every day - on the refrigerator, on your coffee maker, on your toothbrush, on your bathroom vanity mirror, etc.

6. Take your medicine the same time every day, so it becomes a habit.

7. Hire a calling service to give you a daily "wakeup" call to remind you to take your pill. If you have a home voicemail system such as "AnswerCall," you can even program a daily reminder call at the same time each day. You can even sign up online for a free service, like "Mr Wakeup," which will make free reminder calls to you.

8. Use a pill sorter, or a device known as a "dosette," which has compartments for different days, or even different times of the day. See the picture at the top of this post for an example of a "dosette".

9. Get a special device to remind you to take your pill. Epill.com offers a variety of devices, including medication computers, vibrating watches, automatic dispensers, beeprs, and other alarms that can help keep you on schedule for taking your medication.

10. Enlist the aid of a family member or friend to help. Sometimes, just a few weeks of friendly reminders can help you get into the habit of taking your medicine at the right time every day.

2 comments:

Alex Sicre said...

Great post. I wanted to let you know about another great way to help you remember to take your medications: Intelecare.com. We offer a free web-based notification service that allows patients and caregivers to create medical reminders for daily medications, prescription refills, doctor's appointments and vital stats monitoring.

Registration is easy and allows for users to choose how and when they want to be reminded - options include email, text messaging, voice call or all three. We currently have over 3.2M users receiving over 4M reminders daily.

FD: I am the Director of Corporate Development for Intelecare and write a similar blog. I have added you to my blog roll.

Keep up the good work spreading the word about America's Biggest Drug Problem: medication non-adherence.

Anonymous said...

Good suggestions and "one-size never fits all!" OnTimeRx.com offers an assortment of reminder tools, for common ordinary devices - phone, email and pagers. And in addition, ontimerx.com has award-winning software programs that are helping people all over the world.

Free trial downloads are available for OnTimeRx software for Palm and WM PDAs and smart phones, OnTimeRx-Windows for your desktop PC so users can test these programs for 30 days. The noncompliance problem is not just a "senior moment". We all need help with this - Thanks for blogging about it. Take care, Susan