Clinical review
Reviewer: Sanja Mirkov, Professional Practice Fellow, School of Pharmacy, University of Otago
Date of review: June 2018
Comments: This app is useful for patients who know their medications well and need reminders throughout the day, e.g. doses of antibiotics every 8 hours. The app has many useful features such as medication tracking history, flexible scheduling, compliance reminders, pill count - refill reminder, notification for other people – doctor and friends / family, reports for sharing with invitation code, personal well-being records – physical activity and measurements and notifications that can be customised. In addition, depending on information entered, some patients may receive additional information on disease or treatment but the company is not responsible for the content.
Safety concerns: There are quite a few safety concerns around the use of this app, for example:
1) medication - the app relies on the patient/carer populating the data.
2) frequency of administration - this defaults to Daily, and could be unintentionally skipped, potentially leading to suboptimal/ erroneous dosing. It would be better to disable default Daily frequency, so the user has to select the relevant frequency.
3) mode – planned / as needed (PRN) may be confusing for patients. Instead two buttons either “Regular” or “As needed” may be better option. Once the As needed (PRN) option is selected, there is no option to add instructions - the display is: “Only spontaneous”. These medications should have full instructions typed from the pharmacy label or omitted.
4) reminders - when these appear, the medication name, strength and administration time are listed. However, there are no complete label instructions. There is no general advice e.g. as a pop up window when medications are populated, advising patients to keep medications in original containers and to always read pharmacy labels. In addition, once the profile is populated there should be reminder to check instructions against the labels.
5) There is no option to enter cautionary & advisory labels (e.g. with food), indication ( e.g. for PRN) or expiry date of the product (e.g. eye drops)
6) There is no photo or shape and colour description to be selected for tablets and capsules. All forms of medication have the same icon – capsule. The graphics can be improved, there is no use of colour.
7) Measurement - units are in mg/dl not in mmol/L, there is no option to choose.
8) Concerns about information on disease or therapy that some registered users may receive as the source of information has not been disclosed.
New Zealand relevance: There is no database for New Zealand, therefore the likelihood of making errors with manual entries is increased. There is no option for repeat prescription reminders (this is NZ specific).
