Why current medication reminder apps are ineffective for improving adherence

Using current medication reminder applications alone, without any interventions from healthcare professionals, are ineffective in improving adherence. In a relatively large, 3-month study by Morwaski et al, patients with uncontrolled hypertension were randomized to using a mobile health tool, called Medisafe, a highly rated smartphone app for medication management, which allows patients to track medication intake and home blood pressure readings. The results showed that using the app did not improved the Blood Pressure control and showed small, significantly important but clinically unimportant improvement in medication adherence.

In an invited commentary by Logan et al, it has been mentioned that historically, interventions from nurses or pharmacist to prescribe or alter treatments would improve conditions such as blood pressure control. However, this approach is resource intensive and restricted by work force hours. Using mHealth capabilities could let the patients skip the in-person appointments and connect with their healthcare team at their chosen environment and at times that are convenient for them.

Additionally, using mHealth technologies let the patients generate real-time data on their health conditions that can be transmitted to their healthcare team, where the team can assess patient’s response to a treatment and detect drifts in disease stability at an early stage and make a timely decisions. Although Medisafe app has many positive features, patients need a system that can offers immediate, personalized interventions and let the patient communicate with the healthcare team. Lack of these components may have contributed to ineffectiveness of the app. Having trained nonphysician health professionals, such as pharmacists to have access to patient’s real-time healthcare data that let them assess patient’s health and if needed do a consultation, make decisions or alter treatment is the key to successfully close the patient’s care loop.

Vivid platform offers a in-human call service, where medical professionals will have access to patient’s adherence data, generated in real-time using the Vivid bottle and app, and would contact the patients for medication consultation.