The Vital Role of Medication Adherence for the Elderly

Introduction

Medication adherence is a crucial aspect of elderly care, as it directly impacts the health and well-being of seniors. Proper adherence to prescribed medications is essential to manage chronic conditions, prevent complications, and maintain a high quality of life. In this article, we will explore the importance of medication adherence for the elderly, the consequences of not taking medication as prescribed, and provide various strategies to help seniors remember to take their medications.

The Importance of Medication Adherence

Managing Chronic Conditions

Many elderly individuals suffer from chronic medical conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, and arthritis. Proper medication adherence is fundamental in managing these conditions effectively. Non-adherence can result in uncontrolled symptoms, disease progression, and a reduced quality of life.

Preventing Complications

For seniors, failing to take medications as prescribed can lead to serious complications and hospitalization. For example, missing doses of blood-thinning medications can increase the risk of stroke, while non-compliance with insulin therapy can result in uncontrolled blood sugar levels and potential diabetic complications.

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Some useful videos explaining what Memo24 is about

Here are 3 videos we have put together to help you better understand what Memo24 service is about and how to set up your first reminder. Enjoy

Thank you for the Amazing feedback from some of our most loyal users

I wanted to personally thank Val and AnneMarie for the great feedback they have given us during all these past months on their use of Memo24. Not only have we gotten some great constructive comments from them, but also some really kind words that I wanted to share with you.

Val, from Birmingham UK, is one of (if not the) the early adopters of Memo24. Val was of great help in better understanding the need of our users in general. She was also the one who, through her experience using the service, pointed us in the direction of developing a way to record the message (originally one could only type the message which was then converted into speech), so that the voice heard by her father sounds familiar.

This is what Val has to say about Memo24:

“I’m glad I found Memo24 to help in reminding my 94 year old father to take his medication from a distance of 150 miles. It’s an easy system to use, and a very reasonable price. It’s flexible, and can be altered simply to prevent the messages becoming so predictable that they’re no longer ‘listened to’! Also useful for one-off reminders of appointments etc. No system can guarantee compliance when short term memory is failing, but this does help. Very easy to check whether the message has been received. A helpful team in the background too.”

AnneMarie, from Ontario Canada, is one of our newest users, and started using Memo24 to help her Dad while she was away on holidays. But she continued using after her return as she and her Dad both “fell in love” with the service .

This is what AnneMarie has to say about Memo24:

“I subscribed to the Memo24 service this past October to assist my Dad in remembering to take his medication while I was away on vacation. Memo24 reminds my Dad to take his medication twice daily. We both loved the service so much that we’ve continued using it upon my return from vacation. It has allowed me to free up some while still ensuring that my loved one is receiving the reminders that he requires to take his medications on time. As my Dad’s primary care giver, I love the fact that Memo24’s interface is customizable and so user friendly! Thank you for this wonderful service…it really has been so helpful to our family.“

It is indeed this kind of testimonials that makes us feel proud to know that Memo24 is helping people around the world and keep us pushing the service to the next level.

We deeply care about our users and we are always happy to hear from them and especially to learn from their experience in order to better our service.

To all our users, Thank you.

*: image from freepik.com

Recording your reminder message is finally here.

Hello everyone,

Today we are excited to introduce to you the long-awaited recording feature in Memo24.

From now on, when specifying your reminder’s message, you can either:

Enter some text, or (and this is the novelty)
Record a message in your own voice

We have added this feature following the request from many of our users who find that playing a message with a familiar voice would lead to a much greater acceptance of the service by the recipients of the reminders.

And indeed for example, for elderly people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease hearing a voice which is not familiar can lead to the person to completely ignore the phone call medication reminder.

So, we are hoping that this new feature will greatly improve the usefulness of Memo24 and result in higher levels of medication adherence.

* image taken from www.freepik.com

Telephone call reminder that saves lives

One of the latest features addition to Memo24 is the so called “SOS alert” feature.

The way it works is very simple, when adding your telephone call medication reminder, simply add an email address or a mobile phone number where you wanna get the SOS alert.

When such an alert is set, an email or an SMS* will be immediately sent in case the callee (i.e. the recipient of the reminder) did not pick up the phone after all call attempts.

In this scenario, one can think that may be something indeed went wrong with the person you care for, and receiving such an alert prompts you to take immediate action (such as trying to reach your loved one by other means or trying to call the neighbor and ask him/her to go and check up on your loved one).

That is why we think Memo24 SOS alerts can be very useful and even a life saver in some circumstances.

*: Email SOS alerts are always free and there is a nominal fee for sent SMS SOS alerts (check this link for pricing).

Useful Medication Reminders Tips, but Scary Statistics!

Hi,

Today I found this pretty cool infographic by canadadrugcenter.com on simple tips to remember to take your medication and improve your medication compliance / adherence. The infographic was partly inspired by this blog post on psychcentral.com.

The scary thing though is that, according to this source, more than 50% of seniors forget to take their medications and that in the USA alone there are 125,000 yearly deaths from improper taking* of medications :(.

*: which can be forgetting to take medication, taking the wrong medicine, etc.

3 ways to remember your medication

There is a variety of products and services on the market which you can use to set up your (or someone else’s) reminders and in particular your medication reminders. However, one can roughly divide them into 3 main categories:

1. Hardware devices

These can be from simple, compartmentalized boxes to very sophisticated electronic devices. Compartmentalized pill boxes (like these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pill_organizer) are simple plastic boxes where one can place pills in separate compartments for each day of the week and time of the day (typically morning, afternoon, and evening). These are in fact to be considered more as pill organizers rather than medication reminders. A step up in this category are electronic pill boxes, which can be seen as pill boxes with the addition of some kind of visual or audible alarm that will trigger with a given schedule. Some will even have a locking mechanism to control which compartment to open at which given day/time (http://www.medminder.com/). And some more advanced versions can be even equipped with some kind of a caregiver alerting mechanism and/or a two-way communication with a medical emergency service.

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Effectiveness of medication reminders

There has been quite a few studies showing how effective medication reminders are when it comes to improving adherence. “The effectiveness of interventions using electronic reminders to improve adherence to chronic medication: a systematic review of the literature“, is one of those articles that provides a nice review of the literature. The article was published in September 2012 and appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

The authors have selected 13 relevant studies from the literature and reported the details on the effectiveness of reminders to improve adherence. The full article is available here for free.

Continue reading Effectiveness of medication reminders

Happy to see that Memo24 is actually helping people :)

I came across this post today on thecaregiverspace.org website. I am really happy to see that Memo24 is actually helping people to lift some of the burden and worry in their day to day life. It is the story of David and his wife who were looking for a simple solution that will help his father-in-law, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease in its early stage, remember to take his daily pills. The problem is that David and his wife live a few hundred miles away from him, and it is difficult for them to check up on him all the time. Memo24 turned out to be a good solution to their problem. I asked David (who of course agreed on me posting this blog), how he is using the solution on a daily basis. And as it turned out, not only David is setting voice call medication reminders for his father-in-law, but also other types of reminders such as his doctor appointments, some of his important events, and even reminding him about watching that upcoming amazing TV documentary :). David has been using Memo24 for several months now, and according to him reminding his father-in-law by simply calling him on his home telephone and playing a message turned out to be quite an effective way to keep his medication compliance at a good level. I wish all the best for David, his wife, and of course his father-in-law for whom medication adherence is very important to keep healthy and fully enjoy life.