Health Care IT: Mobile Apps Show Promise for Medication Adherence

Mobile Apps Show Promise for Medication Adherence

by Brian Horowitz

Crickets 3G Connectivity

Cricket Communications provides 3G EvDO wireless connectivity to customers in underserved areas and contributed mobile handsets and contracts to the 50 Medicaid patients in the GWU study.

Pill Phones Simplicity

The Vocel Pill Phone app works on the bare-bones, open-source Qualcomm BREW OS of ordinary cell phones, in addition to the newer smartphone OSs such as the Apple iPhone iOS.

Pill Phone Reminder

When a patient gets a reminder to take the anticlotting drug Plavix at 7 a.m., options to select include Taken, Skip Dose—yes, they can do that—and Snooze.

The Dolores Factor

At GWU's medication adherence event on Feb. 9, the organizers introduced Pill Phone study "graduate" Dolores Smith (pictured). Inspired by her, they described a "Dolores Factor" to show how mobile health can help disadvantaged, low-income users with less education who are not regular mobile phone users. "Even if I put it on snooze, it really helped," Smith said, referring to the Pill Phone app.

M-health Research at George Washington University

"Right away patients don't believe they should be taking medications," says Dr. Richard Katz (pictured), director of cardiology at GWU Medical Center, which coordinated the Pill Study research on medication adherence.

A Medication Dosage Diary

The next version of the Pill Phone app will provide a color-coded dosage diary indicating Dose Taken, Dose Skipped, Dose Taken Late and Not Scheduled.

Social Media Features in Pill Phone

In the next version of Pill Phone, doctors will be able to send a pop-up message to patients to ask them to authorize releasing medication compliance info, similar to a friend request in Facebook, Vocel CEO Carl Washburn explained to eWEEK.