Challenge 5 of 52: Medication Compliance
For this Eid Mubarak edition of the challenge, I’ll feature a UX Innovation by my cousin. This week had been chock full of travels and I barely have time to post this entry. Conveniently, one of my cousin is on duty this festive season and posted what she did on Facebook.
Let’s jump straight to the problem. Patient medication non-compliance is a persistent issue in health. It presents in various forms such as irregular dosage, skipped dosage, or not taking the medicine at all. It is critical especially for medications to manage hypertension. I once followed my father to do medical outreach in the rural area and almost the whole day is spent on consulting patient one by one how to really take their medicine.
It’s convenient to point the finger to patient’s lack of discipline but medication instruction are also partly responsible for this inefficiency. The instruction are opaque and don’t reflect the real requirement. For example, what most medication require is for patient to take it at a regular interval (8 or 12 hours) with a full or empty stomach.
However, most medicine come with instruction simply stating 2 times daily after meal. Usually, this will lead the patient to take it after lunch and dinner. However, the real requirement is to take it every 12 hours. So the real time should be 8am and 8pm – not 12 pm and 8pm!
My cousin took the initiative to graphically spell out the time it need to be taken. Patient can now clearly know the required interval. She even went further to individually pack each dosage. This way, the patient’s caretaker can easily see whether he complied or not.