Everything You Need to Know About Our SMART Blister Pack
Are you concerned about your loved ones missing their medications?
According to the Canadian Society of Health Pharmacists Advocacy, 50% of Canadians do not take their medication as prescribed. The National Alliance for Caregiving reports that 50% of families experience emotional stress and anxiety from caring for their loved ones.
When you misuse your medication, you are exposing yourself to serious health risks. Likewise, misuse may occur as a result of either overuse or underuse.
Additionally, it is expensive to deal with medication non-adherence. For instance, in Canada, non-adherence to medications costs the healthcare system between $7 billion and $9 billion. These are taxpayers’ money, which would have benefitted other areas of healthcare.
Pharmacists have developed several methods to monitor adherence. These include patients’ self-report, drug refill data, and conventional blister packs. However, no method has fully captured the true picture of adherence levels in patients like the SMART Bister Pack.
What is the SMART Blister Pack?
The SMART Blister Pack helps families and healthcare practitioners remotely monitor blister pack usage. Your loved ones may be experiencing some difficulty in keeping up with their treatment. Maybe they forget to take the dose at the scheduled time, or they take it at the wrong time. The SMART Blister Pack offers a unique solution to this problem.
How does the SMART Blister Pack work?
The technology combines standard blister packs with SMART technology. This SMART technology senses when a blister pack dose is opened and relays that information to caregivers.
- Programming the blister packs.
Pharmacists package medications into the SMART blister packs by date and time of each dose. The blister packs differ from the traditional ones in that they contain sensors that detect when a dose is open. These sensors
do not significantly affect the packaging design. After the packaging, they program the SMART Blister Pack with an application that works on the smartphone and computer. This process carries no additional cost.
- Conveyance of dosage information.
This technology operates in real-time. When a user pushes a dose open, information gets relayed to the smartphone app by sensors on the pack. This information includes the exact slot from which the dose is taken and the time it was consumed. Caregivers can view detailed information about current and past blister pack adherence on their phone and computer.
How does the SMART Blister Pack communicate?
An alert sounds on the SMART Blister Pack to remind the patient to take each dose. The alert also sounds when the patient takes the dose at the wrong time. Plus, caregivers and members of the healthcare team get real-time information on their smartphones or computers. They can view information on how the patients take their medications and how their adherence has been. A text message is sent to them notifying them of the name or identification number of the patient, the identification number of the blister pack, when a wrong dose is taken, or when the patients forget to take their dose.
This information allows healthcare workers and caregivers to call or visit the patients to remind them to take their medications.
- Extended support.
The Monitoring Team offers temporary or continuing support in cases where the patients lack caregivers who monitor their alerts.
- Data Analysis.
The healthcare team uses the data from all users of the SMART Blister Pack to analyze trends to help find ways of raising adherence.
Benefits of the SMART Blister Pack
There are many benefits to switching over to our SMART Blister Pack to help with medication management.
The SMART Blister Pack:
- Helps healthcare practitioners and families of elderly patients monitor the treatment of patients remotely.
- Improves patient adherence to prescription drugs and medications.
- Helps the members of the healthcare team to analyze and improve the adherence of individual patients, which may help improve their health.
Finally, if you would like to learn more about our SMART Blister Pack, please contact us at [email protected]. Not only will we provide all the information you need, but we can also help you transition into this new medication management system.