What is the most frustrating thing that you face as a Mom? Okay, let me be more specific because that question is a can of worms!

What is the most frustrating thing that you face as a Mom with regard to your family’s health care needs?

For me, it is remembering to go to doctor’s appointments, remembering to schedule them, remembering the health care forms I need for sports and school, remembering prescriptions refills, remembering to take the prescription. {Okay, maybe that is more than one frustrating thing.} I’m always looking for good mobile health apps that helps me with all of it. I’m probably not the only one. Nearly 70% of Americans take a least one prescription a day. Add vitamins to the mix and how do you remember it all!

Forgetting these things can mean serious complications, and improving medication adherence is a challenge for many of us. If you had surgery like I did, or have a long term health care issue like my mother-in-law, taking your prescription is essential. In fact, 50% of Americans don’t take medications as prescribed and it can cause death and long term poor outcomes.

A new ecosystem in Mobile Health Management.

Imagine in an app that has 60,000 images of prescriptions in a database. You find your medication, you enter in all the details (dose, pharmacy, doctor, refill information) along with when and how you are supposed to take it (daily, monthly, as needed, and even complex dosing instructions) and a reminder message will alert your phone (any phone, not just a smartphone), computer or tablet. You can even decide what the message says! Maybe it says: ‘Take your Advil’. Or maybe it says, ‘You know what you need to do’ (if you want more privacy.) Or maybe you get sassy and say,’Do you really want another child right now?’ when you need a reminder about your birth control pill.

You can even set up refill reminders. You can set the reminder based on quantity or expiration date. If you set it up by quantity, the app monitors your confirmation of your medication intake, and then will send you a reminder when you are getting low. You can even set up the pharmacy contact information in the app, so you can call right from your phone when the alert comes through, taking away a huge step that I never can seem to complete.

Health Care Solutions

Sounds like science fiction, right? Well it is real and it is now. It is a new Health Care Management Solution from Janssen Healthcare Innovation, a division of Johnson & Johnson. The Care4Today™ Mobile Health Manager app can be downloaded from the App Store or Google Play, but if you don’t have a smartphone, you can also sign up at the website and receive reminders via text message.
It is called Care4Management™. In addition to the features above, it also has two other noteworthy components!

Care4Charity™
Care4Charity™ gives people who take care of their own health the opportunity to make a positive difference in the world. Users can select one of the three charities (AIDS United, Save the Children and American Diabetes Association) to receive a donation from Janssen Healthcare Innovation for each day they indicate they have taken all of their medications. JHI has committed a minimum donation of $20,000 to each charity, and a maximum additional donation of $90,000 to all of them combined – for a maximum total donation of $150,000

Care4Family™
Another great feature of this app is the Care4Family™. You can connect with up to 15 other users, like your Mom or Dad, teenage son or college daughter. Then you can set up ways to monitor them. Perhaps your Mom is elderly and lives in another state. You can connect with her and get alerts when she misses a dose or forgets to refill a prescription. Of if your son is allergic to nuts, you can send a reminder to him at college, if you get an alert he has not refilled his epi-pen prescription. This is a big feature because 40% of adults in the United States are caring for an elderly parent or a child with serious health issue.

You can see reports in a neat graph for each connection you have which shows missed doses and other alerts that you have set up. It is a nice feature when you go to a doctor’s appointment. I don’t know about you, but when I am in that doctor’s room and they ask me if I am on any medications or ask me details, I can never remember. With this app and its Care4Family feature, it is a great communication tool with a doctor; for yourself, or having a discussion on behalf of a family member. You can even send notifications to doctors. If the future, the app may even send automatic alerts or be connect to your doctor’s office automatically where they can see if you need a new prescription or a refill. Hopefully in the future, the alert will just be sent automatically to the pharmacy too! (Now that would be awesome!)

If you don’t want to connect with other independent users, you can set up family members right in your own application. This probably will apply if you have a younger child who can not respond to reminders and alerts or if they don’t have their own phone. So, for your child, you can set up the reminders on your own account. All the medications would look like they are yours, but the developers hope to have clear delineation in future iterations.

While the app is a serious health care tool, you can use it for other task too, making it a valuable addition to your personal electronic network. Even though it should be for health care management, you can set up reminders for other households tasks like reminders for your teen son to take out the trash on Tuesday nights, or a reminder for your child to call grandma once a week. Perhaps you can even use it to remind you when you fed your baby last especially when you are breastfeeding.

There are limitations with the app right now though. In addition to the ones already mentioned, additional language support, like Spanish, is not there. But it will be added in future months. There is also no details about side effects or potential drug interactions. Yet, that is also something they are considering.

All in all, this app has HUGE potential and I haven’t been as excited about the prospect of something like this in a long time. Health care has come a long way, and it is great to see an app like this following right along!

This mobile management solution was just launched today so head over to mhm.care4today.com for all the details and to get started! It’s free!!