“Ideas come from curiosity.”
- Walt Disney
It started with non-adherence. I was working for a large healthcare company, and learned about a big problem in healthcare - medication non-adherence. Failure to take one’s medications leads to billions of dollars of preventable costs in the United States every year. There are numerous reasons for this, including: out-of-pocket costs, access, uncomfortable side effects, and many others. One of the big reasons for nonadherence, however, is forgetfulness.
The second piece of the puzzle was automated reminders. This came a couple of years later when experimenting with an Amazon Alexa and voice reminders. I programmed it to voice a reminder to get a coffee every morning at 9am. The first few days were pretty cool, engaging with voice rather than phone alerts. After two weeks, however, it became old. I grew to become annoyed as it got closer to the alarm time, a negative anticipation. Another week or two was all it took for that experiment to run its course and shut it down.
There wasn’t a chronic medical condition that needed attention, so maybe this wasn’t a fair test. Regardless, the monotony and repetition were real. It's straightforward to extrapolate that those dealing with multiple medications at multiple times every day have an especially difficult time.
Fast forward a few years…
Sparked by hearing a story of how text messages helped individuals get back to the gym more often, I had the idea to use storytelling to make reminders more creative and not monotonous. I started to sketch out ideas and then met my friend Heath for coffee to ask questions about data analytics. Before the coffee was done, Heath asked if he could help. Mike was next, and after a few days was on-board for the technical development. Finally Matt signed on for the design and user experience. All four of us had worked together before at the healthcare company Updox, of which Mike was a co-founder.
There are a LOT of no cost ways to set up alarms or reminders to help one remember to take one's medication - especially now with the widespread use of smartphones. Apple has even released the feature to work on the iPhone and Apple Watches. But almost all of those solutions do the same thing, robotically prodding with the same prompt at the same time day. After day. After day. After day. After day. After day.…. You get the idea. Lame.
We wondered what would happen if you could mix it up: how that reminder happens, when it happens, and if you got something to hold your attention to help form a healthy habit. What if an alarm told me a new joke every time I had to take my medications? Or shared a short poem. Or a Zen quotation. Or??
That’s where we started. The question now is how many people can we help with their ongoing goals? We hope the answer is “a lot”, so it can be our contribution to making the world a better place. Thanks for visiting.
Have feedback or questions? Please reach out to us at feedback@rxminder.co.