Open source medication adherence tools?

Bryn M. Reeves bmr at redhat.com
Tue Feb 2 16:46:46 UTC 2010


On Tue, 2010-02-02 at 10:59 -0500, Ralph Blach wrote:
> I agree this is a good endevour, and if you start it, I will participate.

Great! I'll keep you posted as to how I get on.

> But, IMHO, pills are the worst medication delivery method possible.
> They depend on a person to take on every day, an iffy proposal for even the
> most dedicated at best.

That's very true and I certainly hope that we start to see some real
applications of technology to help ease the burden on people who are
dependent on some sort of medication in their lives.

In the meantime though I think tools that help individuals to manage
things better are definitely a good stop-gap.

> A much better way to deliver medicine would be to have method, that be
>  put into the body, dispense the medicine and then disolve.

Actually for some types of drugs this sort of delivery system is already
available. Not quite something that dissolves in the body (rather,
they're usually an oil-based or solid carrier that disperses very slowly
through tissues) but depot injections offer some of these advantages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injection_%28medicine%29#Depot_injection

Downside is that they are only available for quite limited ranges of
drugs at this time and are not suited if there is a likelihood that the
drug regime or dosing will need to be adjusted.

I agree that new technology should hold some promise in this area.

Cheers,
Bryn.




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