Ask HN: Best way to track medications for elderly family member?

3 points by shipman05 51 days ago | 4 comments

I have an elderly family member who has a large number of medications. They seem to frequently lose track of what meds they're taking.

Worse, it seems that doctors often prescribe new medications without a full understanding of what meds are already being used and what possible interactions might be.

I've tried a shared Google Doc, but struggle to get all parties involved to keep it updated. Are there any good, dedicated apps for this sort of thing (that aren't just data mining operations)? My initial searching yielded a lot of junk.

What do y'all use for similar situations?

k310 51 days ago |

Would some kind of checklist work?

For each designated time (morning, lunch, ... ) do not pass GO until all items are checked.

I helped a med school instructor with zero budget, and fortunately enough, a bunch of iPads in the storage room.

For a patient assessment class, he needed a big checklist, so I set up some trivial code in Numbers (Free Excel) and that worked very well. It even collaborates these days, though we never got there, though a copy of the sheet on shared storage is fine.

or some automated/automator action.

One virtue is that all prescriptions can be embedded in the sheet, for the benefit of physicians with a copy of the sheet.

Missing piece? Without too much data-gathering, please note that grapefruit interferes with some meds. Nobody ever asked.

gus_massa 50 days ago |

Who lives with the old person?

Have you tried a pill dispenser? There are many types, from cheap to super fancy https://www.google.com/q=pill+dispenser

I'm afraid you must go to the medical doctors visit and update the doc.

ZeroGravitas 51 days ago |

There are services that put the weekly pill regime into a custom blister pack with morning, noon and night so you can keep track of what's been taken and what's not.

"Medication adherence packaging systems" appears to be a term of art for them.

myls2go 51 days ago |

I use a button reminder for my daily pills and for my epileptic dog.

Been using it over the last three weeks and not one missed dose/double dose because it’s right next to the medicine cabinet, chirps at us when it’s time, and logs presses to Google Sheets.Both my partner and I have access to the chart so we can easily see when a dose was given by the other + the physical form of a button that site right next to the pills helps. We don’t always have our phones on us at home.