Development Of A Medication Reminder And Research On The Improvement Of Medication Compliance

Background In the course of disease prevention and control,especially for the treatment of chronic diseases,the medication compliance of patients has a great impact on the treatment effect and prognosis.Low medication adherence may worsen the disease,leading to increased morbidity,mortality and medical costs.At present,there are a lot of measurement or evaluation method of compliance,such as questionnaire,patient self reporting,patient diaries,prescription supplement rate,tablet counting,electronic monitoring,drug level detection,direct observation and so on.Each method has its own advantages and disadvantages,and the measurement and evaluation methods should depend on the purpose of the study and the available resources,and as far as possible to select more than one type of method of measurement and comparison to obtain more accurate measurement or evaluation data.In general,patients with poor medication compliance is caused by a variety of factors,which can be broadly divided into the causes of the disease,the reasons for patients and health care workers,the reasons for treatment and health systems and environmental reasons,etc..And forgetting is the most common cause of medication compliance.Therefore,many scholars use medication reminder to improve the medication compliance of patients,such as using the alarm,SMS of mobile phone or special equipment to improve the medication compliance on those patients with hypertension,pulmonary tuberculosis,chronic kidney disease,diabetes,asthma and epilepsy.Although the above methods have achieved a certain effect,there are single function,or cumbersome,or lack of medication records,or expensive and other defects.Therefore,it is necessary to find a simple and easy way to remind patients to take medicine.In this paper,we proposed the study of developing a medication reminder APP based on the Android platform,and added the medication record function to record the patient's medication time for patients and medical staff access and analysis,but also help researchers to study medication compliance and other research.Objective To develop a medication reminder based on Android platform,which can be used to set up personalized reminders quickly and record the patient's medication time-stamp and related information.In addition,the effect of using the reminder on medication compliance was studied.Methods Developing a medication reminder based on the Android platform,the medication record module was used to record the specific medication time of patients.14 subjects participated in the evaluation of medicationcompliance.The differencesof dosage and medication rate between the group using and without using reminder were investigated.The dosage and medication rate were evaluated by the pill counting.And the Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed ranktest was used to analyze the difference between the two cases.Results The differencesof dosage and medication rate betweenthe group that using and without using reminder were investigated.The dosage and medication rate were evaluated by the pill counting.The Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed ranktest showed that the dosage and the medication rate of the group that using reminder were significantly higher than that without using reminder(Z=-2.93,P=0.003).In addition,using Chi-square to test all medication records,we found that there was no significant difference in medication rate between male and female subjects.The Fisher's exact test was used to analyze the compliance of male and female,we found that there was no significant differenceeither.Conclusion The experimental results indicated that the use of the reminder can indeed significantly improve the medication dose and rate,but there is no gender difference in medication compliance.The reminder can be a new technical support for clinical research on medication compliance,and also can reduce the workload for medical staff and patients.