MediPal

Medical adherence (also known as medication adherence or medication compliance) refers to the degree to which a patient correctly follows medical advice and treatment plans prescribed by their healthcare providers. This involves taking medications at the prescribed times, dosages, and frequencies, and following through on recommended lifestyle and dietary changes.

Poor medical adherence accounts for an estimated 125,000 annual deaths among Americans, and costs the healthcare system $300 billion a year in emergency medical appointments and hospitalizations, as cited by heart.org. Many of these issues stem from people not understanding, and consequently not trusting their medications.

With this, we were given a task. "Develop an innovative technology/app solution that enhances medical adherence among patients with chronic diseases, ensuring it is accessible and effective for diverse patient demographics."

MediPal is a personalized medicine tracker that streamlines the tracking process while providing users with the agency to customize, learn about, and manage their medication to their own needs.

We found that one big issue surrounding medical adherence was insufficient communication between patients and providers. High medication costs also disrupt medication frequencies.

On our journey to create a solution, we began by researching and understanding how people currently deal with and manage their medications. We found PatientsLikeMe — an online forum where people can share their experiences living with various medical conditions.

Our research showed us that a majority of users had trouble maintaining a large number of medications. From this, it seemed that a medication tracker was the way to continue with our project.

We conducted a competitor analysis comparing other common medicine tracking apps. We focused on their medicine scheduling and reminding capabilities, as well as the level of quality of medicine information.

Through our research, we found that the biggest pain points among users were...

With this, we developed this question to guide us through the rest of this project:
‍
‍How might we improve user's understanding of their medications and empower them to adhere to their regimens?

Our user flow focuses on our defined major pain points, ensuring that we design an experience appropriate for managing medicine regiments. We wanted our ensure that our user flow was streamlined and simple for users.

The next step was to translate this research and synthesis into low-fidelity wireframes. The main features we wanted our app to have were medication reminders / information, color-coordinated medications, and an easily digestible in-app calendar.

Through the use of reminders, customizability, and insights, we have created a deeply personalized medicine tracking experience. Highlighted below are some key features that make the app possible.

Medical adherence is an issue that persists and will continue to persist, and the best we can do is to do as much research, testing, and understanding of the field of medicine as possible. Though our app tries to solve the glaring pain points of medical adherence, there are still many issues of medical adherence that we were unable to address. Medicine is, of course, a very expansive and studied field.

One major factor that affects medical adherence — which we couldn't fully address — is patient-provider connectivity. Providing users with a direct line to their provider could help users clear up the many confusing details about medicine, and is a step we could take in the future to improve MediPal. We also wanted to implement the ability to share medication regimens and statistics to trusted friends and family, which could provide users with a support system to help with their daily regimens.