Reducing Medication Noncompliance among the Elderly
The elderly are the group most likely to be taking to be taking prescription drugs on a daily basis. Unfortunately, they’re also the group that’s most likely to have difficulties taking their pills as required. The potential issues are numerous and they tend stem from problems that typically affect seniors. Forgetfulness, vision impairment and conditions such as arthritis are all things that can increased the risk of medication noncompliance among the older members of our society.
Nearly a quarter of all nursing home admissions are due to seniors failing to take their medications as needed and prescription medication noncompliance results in 10% of all hospital admissions. Do those numbers seem high? Well, they shouldn’t. Not when you consider that almost one in five patients don’t follow their prescriptions and 6% aren’t even capable of identifying their very own medications. Research suggests that a quarter of the elderly take at least three drugs and sadly, those who take three or more are particularly at risk of poor compliance with their prescribed treatment plans.
The various conditions that afflict our senior citizens aren’t going to go away overnight, so we need to simplify things for them so that they’re less likely to skip on taking their pills. This is what Medipense is hoping to do with its RxPense device. The machine addresses many of the problems that older people face and provides them with solutions that should make their lives easier and, most importantly, healthier.
RxPense has a pill dispensing device that automates the delivery of medications. It provides patients with the right pills at the right time. With the machine, seniors don’t have to struggle to open traditional pill boxes. They don’t have to worry about trying to remember which pills to take and when. The device handles all of this, so all the patient needs to concern themselves with is ingesting their medication when prompted to.
One of the best things about RxPense is that it will actually notify caregivers if a patient fails to take their pills. With it, you no longer have to rely on the word of the patient. If they claim to have taken their medication on time and didn’t, the machine will know and alert the appropriate person. This obviously greatly reduces the risk of medication non-compliance, which, in turn, helps the patient to live longer and increase the amount of time that they can spend in their own home.
Statistics show that as many as 38,000,000 senior citizens in America develop drug complications every year. About 180,000 of those complications could result in death. Those numbers are staggering. The RxPense device has the potential to make a serious dent in those numbers, so we owe it to our seniors to make the machines available to them. We also owe it to ourselves, because if we can reduce the burden on the healthcare system, it’s society as a whole that will benefit.
