Medication non-adherence is one of the most common problems that can not only impact a patient’s health and treatment progress but also result in colossal expenses for both medical organizations and their clients as well. As for people with chronic illnesses, taking medications in time can even extend their lifespan and minimize the risks of premature death.
These are only a few factors that resulted in the development of the various health tracking software – solutions targeted at monitoring the health indicators, measuring the progress of health maintenance, disease prevention, and the management of chronic conditions.
With more and more people ready to invest in their health and well-being today, the global market for medication adherence systems and technologies started evolving rapidly.
According to the BCC Research report, during the forecasted period of 2020-2025, the market share of the medication tracking software solutions is expected to reach $6 billion, which makes it one of the most attractive yet prospective healthcare scopes you can invest in today.
In this article, we’ll introduce the basics of medication tracking software, analyze its essential features and find out its major benefits for the patients and healthcare providers as well.
What Is a Medication Tracking System and Why Is It Important?
Medication tracking solutions are used for the constant monitoring and management of the patients’ medication intake. It performs as a so-called pill tracker that notifies a patient to take medication on time as well as informs the healthcare workers about the patient’s pill intake.
Additionally, the medication tracker can remind about renewing or refilling the prescription, and even help to control the newly-prescribed medication intake by simply scanning the QR or barcode of the drug package.
The other helpful features of the pill intake software are the drug inventory, the ability to provide essential drug information, as well as simple and easy interaction between patients and caregivers.
Depending on the app functionality, there are 3 main types of medication tracking software:
- Simple medication reminders – ensure the patients are notified about taking their medications on time with the use of standard notifications on their devices.
- Advanced medication trackers – responsible for tracking the drug intake, recording the late or missed doses, medication photos, and brief user notes.
- Medication tracking systems – combine the features of the first two software solutions, are usually connected to the patient’s electronic health profile and enable sharing the drug intake data with the doctor
This type of software can greatly facilitate pill intake control, especially for the outpatients, elder people, patients with chronic diseases and mental disorders, as well as many other groups of patients that need to regularly take many drugs or tend to forget to take their medicines on time.
On the other hand, the medical institutions can provide their services remotely, improve patient engagement and loyalty, and reduce the time spent interacting with each individual without sacrificing quality.
Moreover, the pill tracking software can digitalize the medication inventory, which is always problematic for most of the institutions in healthcare.
Essential Features of Medication Tracking Software
To ensure you’re developing the most time and cost-effective hospital medication tracking system, it’s vital to understand which features should it include.
Below, you’ll find the most useful features of a medication tracking app that can surely improve the performance of a healthcare unit and take the patient service onto the next level of development.
#1 Medication Scheduling
First of all, the core feature of the medication tracking app is the ability to schedule the drug intake and track the progress. Overall, it should include the name of medicine, its physical descriptions, doses, administration method, and time of intake.
Additionally, it’s good to also cover the notes from a caregiver who explains the treatment process in simple words, so as to minimize the possibility of medication non-adherence.
#2 Drug Intake Reminder
Next, one of the best functions of any medication tracker is the ability to send notifications or reminders due to the drug intake schedule. This feature helps patients to take the medicine on time and ensure they haven’t missed their dose.
Daily reminders can not only record the time of when and how much drugs were taken but also can assist in reminding when the prescribed medications are almost out of stock. This means the patients are less likely to forget to take the pills or replenish the stock once when needed.
#3 Interaction Checker
During the treatment process, patients sometimes need to check the compatibility of different drugs, ensure they won’t lose their effectiveness and cannot harm their health (for instance, because of an allergy to some components or other conditions).
Interaction checkers can provide up-to-date information about the drugs and their components, and warn the patients if they need to consult a doctor before their intake.
#4 Medical Data Sharing
Any treatment process requires being conducted under medical supervision, which usually takes lots of time and resources from both the patient and caregiver.
The medication tracking software, however, can effectively resolve this by automatically sharing your health indicators and drug intake records with your doctor.
Not only the patients can get immediate comments from their caregivers, but also the medical units can eliminate the paperwork, reduce the time on documentation running and always stay informed about the patient’s treatment progress and health status as well.
#5 Chat With Caregivers
The 2021’s McKinsey & Company research has revealed that after the spike in the Q2 of 2020, telehealth utilization has finally stabilized at levels 38X higher than before the pandemic.
In other words, it’s not our “future” anymore but today’s reality. And medication tracking systems can help medical institutions make one more step towards telemedicine adoption: by enabling patients to schedule online appointments and chat with their doctors within the app!
This way, they can get professional consultancy in the shortest time frames and also eliminate the time needed to physically visit a doctor to handle the simple procedures, like renewing the prescription, asking about the treatment process details, and many more.
Main Advantages and Benefits of a Medication Tracker
To provide you with a clearer idea of why the medication tracking app is worth developing and adopting, let’s briefly review the most essential advantages of this healthcare solution from different points of view: healthcare providers and their patients.
After the implementation of medication tracking software, the healthcare institutions can:
- Get up-to-date patient health information and treatment progress
- Monitor the health indicators of their clients
- Easily reach their patients and provide online assistance during the treatment process
- Renew the drug prescriptions for each patient
- Conduct a drug inventory
- Boost the patients’ engagement and loyalty, and, of course, the company’s income
On the other side, the patients that use medication trackers will:
- Receive the detailed information about the drugs prescribed: their doses, time of intake, compatibility, and more
- Schedule the physician appointment online if there are any questions to discuss
- Ask for renewal of the prescriptions
- Get reminders about the drug intake and record it
- Receive notifications when the pill intake is over or needed replenishing the stock
- Track their health indicators, such as heart rate, physical activity, water drink, etc
- Share their health data with the caregiver
With this said, medication tracking solutions are one of the most important healthcare apps that can greatly help to improve treatment efficiency, track and manage the health data within a single app.
All these advantages make this software one of the most important solutions in medicine that can surely take the treatment to a new level of development.
Why Choose Intellectsoft for Medication Software Development?
With years of experience in healthcare software development, our team features well-trained, highly expert software creators that are always ready to assist in launching innovative health tracking systems like medication tracking software, hospital management software, medical chatbot systems, and many more.
Intellectsoft’s best professionals are constantly tracking the latest healthcare IT trends to help you and your organization always stay one step ahead of competitors.
Conclusion
To sum up, medication tracking solutions are one of the most popular healthcare trends that can significantly boost healthcare service quality and ensure effective medication adherence for patients.
Not only can it simplify the medication intake, but also benefit the treatment progress, communication with patients, drug inventory, tracking the essential health indicators, and many more. These qualities make medication software one of the most essential healthcare IT solutions and software services the medical institutions should start employing today.
At Intellectsoft, we’re ready to help healthcare companies to empower their workforces with the most effective software solutions that will benefit from day one. Do you and your organization have the idea to develop today?
Talk to our experts and find out how to transform your project into realities and get the most of its implementation right away!
