{"id":42558,"date":"2022-06-08T22:04:00","date_gmt":"2022-06-08T22:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/apples-medication-feature-is-a-step-in-the-right-direction\/"},"modified":"2022-06-08T22:04:00","modified_gmt":"2022-06-08T22:04:00","slug":"apples-medication-feature-is-a-step-in-the-right-direction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/apples-medication-feature-is-a-step-in-the-right-direction\/","title":{"rendered":"Apple&#8217;s medication feature is a step in the right direction"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div>\n<p id=\"YzoE25\">Apple isn&#8217;t inventing anything new with its medication tracking feature for iPhone and Apple Watch, which the company announced as part of watchOS 9 at WWDC 2022 this week.  There are plenty of apps already on the market that give people alerts when they&#8217;re supposed to take their medications.<\/p>\n<p id=\"nxsV5H\">But trying to get people to take their drugs regularly is a major problem in healthcare, and around half of the people prescribed medications for chronic conditions don&#8217;t take them as instructed.  That non-adherence costs the healthcare system hundreds of billions of dollars a year because people get sicker when they don&#8217;t take their meds properly.  And even though the tool doesn&#8217;t have everything on experts&#8217; wish lists for the ideal drug app, a tech company like Apple entering the ring could be a helpful development.<\/p>\n<p id=\"jMKcSY\">\u201cI think it is a step in the right direction,\u201d says Seth Heldenbrand, an associate professor of pharmacy practice at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.<\/p>\n<div class=\"c-float-right\">\n<aside id=\"pnTxAG\"><q>&#8220;I think it is a step in the right direction.&#8221;<\/q><\/aside>\n<\/div>\n<p id=\"xV1ILa\">The tool lets users input a list of the medications they take and set a specific reminder schedule for each drug.  When it&#8217;s time to take a med, people get an alert on their iPhone or Apple Watch.  Then, they can hit &#8220;taken&#8221; or &#8220;skipped&#8221; to log the dose.  The Health app will track how often a user takes their meds over time. <\/p>\n<p id=\"uI3nOs\">These types of nudges can help improve medication adherence, research shows.  It&#8217;s helpful for the subset of patients where forgetting to take a drug is the main reason that they&#8217;re not adhering to a treatment plan, says Mary de Vera, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia who studies medication adherence.  But it&#8217;s less helpful for other groups: if someone isn&#8217;t taking medication because they don&#8217;t understand why it&#8217;s necessary, a smartphone alert isn&#8217;t going to solve the problem. <\/p>\n<p id=\"y8Wrmq\">People who use Apple&#8217;s medication app will be able to share their medication history with family members or others through the Health app&#8217;s sharing feature.  That could give doctors insight into how their patients are taking medications, which Heldenbrand says is useful information.  But it&#8217;d only be one-sided through the app &#8211; and one-sided communication around medication has historically been less successful than a system where doctors can write back, de Vera says.  Nudges tend to work better if they&#8217;re part of a positive feedback loop with providers. <\/p>\n<p id=\"fbWJhn\">Just offering up a reminder feature might not drive major changes, particularly around something as challenging as medication adherence.  &#8220;A patient might have a high internal motivation to start using something like this and interacting with it &#8211; but do they keep using it, and does it actually help them take their medications?  That adherence needle is a hard needle, \u201dHeldenbrand says.<\/p>\n<div class=\"c-float-right\">\n<aside id=\"57NyMx\"><q>&#8220;That adherence needle is a hard needle.&#8221;<\/q><\/aside>\n<\/div>\n<p id=\"EoNOfy\">For iPhone users, this feature would be more accessible than some standalone apps already on the market.  Users wouldn&#8217;t have to figure out how to download and set up a separate program, especially if they&#8217;re already using the Health app.  Because this is in the existing Apple ecosystem, it also means users aren&#8217;t sending their health data to another third party.  \u201cThat provides a layer of protection for patients&#8217; privacy,\u201d Heldenbrand says. <\/p>\n<p id=\"DijzyL\">Apps also come and go, and a tech giant like Apple offers more stability to someone&#8217;s routine &#8211; which experts say could be good for getting people to keep taking their medicine.  \u201cThis is like long game, especially when we&#8217;re talking about medication adherence,\u201d de Vera says.  &#8220;For some patients, it&#8217;s lifelong.  So you need a player that is going to play the long game. &#8220;<\/p>\n<p id=\"hqYMN4\">A medication feature means people and their doctors could see how<strong> <\/strong>medication adherence is related to changes in things like sleep, exercise, and heart rhythm on the Health app.  Those relationships could also be valuable to researchers looking at big-picture trends.  Right now, even though there&#8217;s data to show that some people take medications more regularly when they&#8217;re using an app, it&#8217;s not clear if or how much that goes on to improve their health, Heldenbrand says.  &#8220;That&#8217;s the million dollar question right now.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p id=\"BaaqOS\">Of course, that would require Apple to decide to either share information with researchers or launch their own studies to answer some of these questions.  If they do, though, there could be a lot to learn.  \u201cIt&#8217;d be very rich,\u201d de Vera says.  &#8220;And it would lead to a better understanding of how patients are taking their medications.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Apple isn&#8217;t inventing anything new with its medication tracking feature for iPhone and Apple Watch, which the company announced as part of watchOS 9 at WWDC 2022 this week. There are plenty of apps already on the market that give people alerts when they&#8217;re supposed to take their medications. But trying to get people to &hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"> <a class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/apples-medication-feature-is-a-step-in-the-right-direction\/\"> <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Apple&#8217;s medication feature is a step in the right direction<\/span> Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"default","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cdn.vox-cdn.com\/thumbor\/zknoGjwcxXifrAkBnVMaEk2Y8iU=\/0x519:1306x1203\/fit-in\/1200x630\/cdn.vox-cdn.com\/uploads\/chorus_asset\/file\/23615092\/Apple_WWDC22_watchOS_9_iPhone13Pro_Medications_schedules_220606_inline.jpg.large_2x.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42558"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42558\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}