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A Smart Pillbox To Improve Medication Compliance
Roland Piquepaille writes "A major challenge in public health is that people do not take their medications, a phenomenon known as 'medication non-adherence.' In the US alone, it is estimated that this accounts for 10% of all hospital visits and costs the healthcare system $100 billion per year and $60 billion to the pharmaceutical industry. Now, an MIT research team thinks it has a solution to this problem that will save lives worldwide. They've developed the uBox, a convenient, palm-sized, intelligent pill dispenser, 'which reminds a patient when it is time to take his medication, records when a patient has taken a dose, and prevents a patient from double-dosing.' The first large-scale trial with 100 uBoxes is scheduled to begin in May in Bihar, India, in a 6-month long tuberculosis treatment program."
And how does the pillbox know that you actually took the pill, as opposed to taking it out of the pillbox so that it will quit nagging you?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I wouldn't be surprised if this was RIAA-style math. What it possibly means is that the pharmaceutical industry would make an additional $60B a year if people took all the pills they're supposed to. But since people forget to take some of them, pharma considers it "lost revenue".
This guy's the limit!
How is this better than the already-in-trials Cypak box, which also reminds the patient to take the pills, registers the time/date taken per pill, transfers results over RFID to doctors, etc, has the added advantage of looking exactly like an ordinary pharma blister pack?
The problem with this is not an issue of people needing to be reminded of the doses they've taken, or should take. The biggest issue I see is WILLFUL non-compliance with a doctors advice. Now granted, doctors are only human as well so they can make mistakes but the number of people I hear tell me that "oh well i have a pill for this, but i do not take it" because they think they know more than the doctor (which sadly is SOMETIMES the case when one looks at it in a 'knows more about this situation' issue).
..., n(st|th|rd) opinions are for. Self diagnosis is about as reliable as the Mitch Hedburg round-about aids test if you have no background in biochem.
This mentality is a lot more prevalent than I would have thought prior to working in travel medical insurances. The number of people who would get angry because we had to count them as treating a condition because they had a specific prescription on their history but they refused to take it was staggering. Somehow, it then becomes our fault that they have an exclusion because they were not complying with the prescribed treatment.
To get Dickens on it: Given that non-compliance is generating these costs, i'm guessing its also generating casualties, which means the tendancy will eventually be minimized across the gene pool.
Wish that helped my generations health costs though.
Protips: If you disagree with your doctor, that is what second, third,
Ice Cream has no bones.
Based on my understanding of US law, carying a controlled substance (anything that requires a prescription) in anything other that the official bottle it came in is a federal crime. All such daily and weekly pillboxes are illegal. My father was stopped and threatened with arrest when one such item was disovered, he had to rummage through his cary on luggage to find enough pill bottles with appropriate names and descriptions such that they let him through (though they noted that just having them out of the appropriate container was illegal). How do such pill boxes deal with the legal issues? If you take one on a trip and don't bring the bottle with the appropriate documentation, should you be subject to arrest?
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