Maggie Helps Her Husband Manage His Health With One Free App

Maggie, a blogger and Medisafe user, describes how Medisafe app makes managing her and her husband’s health as easy as possible:
“I’ve sometimes joked that age isn’t measured in years, but rather in the number of pills you have to take every day just to keep you going. Thankfully I’m in reasonably good health but I still have three medications I take every day. I’m quite good at taking them on time, but I often lose track of when I’m running out and need to renew my prescription. My husband has 5 daily tablets to drop, plus others on an as needed basis, and as one of the side effects of his illness is forgetfulness, we have to be super organized to make sure he takes the right dosage each day, doesn’t accidentally double up, and orders his new drugs in plenty of time. Thus, we were pointed in the direction of Medisafe.

Medisafe is a free smartphone app to help you organize your medications and prescriptions. Medisafe boasts that their users have 86% compliance with their medicine regime compared to the national (for USA) average of 50%. It has a virtual pill box (divided in to 4 timeframes for each day) in to which you load the medicines you need to take. There’s an auto-suggest feature in there with a huge list of medicines in it, or you can free type the name of yours. You can customize the dosage and appearance so that your virtual pill box looks just like your real one.

So why, you may be wondering, is this any better than a plastic pill caddy you can pick up from the pound shop?
Because you tell Medisafe what time you are supposed to take each pill, it can pop up on your phone and remind you if you’ve not done so. Mine alerts me at 9am every day, by which point I’ve usually taken my medicine and I just mark it as ‘taken’ on the app. However, where this works brilliantly is you can have Medfriends – so I also get alerted if my husband hasn’t marked his pills as taken, and I can give him a gentle prod. This is a god-send for someone with anxiety as he doesn’t have to do any of the remembering. You can also add dependents – people who don’t have their own app log in (children, elderly relatives) who you can keep track of medicines for yourself.

The alerts to re-order prescriptions is also very useful. I usually bung my boxes of tablets in the bathroom cabinet, and keep one strip at a time in my handbag, so I lose track of how many I have left, and often find myself re-ordering with great urgency. When you set a new medicine up with MediSafe you tell it how many dosages you have. Then every time you mark a medicine as taken it reduces the count in your ‘medicine cabinet’ and alerts you at your chosen limit (eg 5 tablets left). This is a huge relief to me as it gives me enough notice to fill out a repeat prescription request or make an appointment to see my GP. The app is really easy to set up and use, and has fit nicely in to our lives already in the fortnight we’ve been using it. There’s other features we’ve yet to use, like tracking doctor’s appointments, that I’m sure we’ll find useful.”
Click here for Maggie’s original post