Do Make It Personal -- Adherence System Delivers Automated Reminders In Your Voice

Main Category: Compliance
Also Included In: IT / Internet / E-mail
Article Date: 11 Dec 2007 - 4:00 PDT

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If mom is the CEO of her family's healthcare, how well she runs her "company" and manages her own time are vital to her family's health - and to the bottom line of all sectors of the healthcare industry. With pharmaceutical manufacturers losing $30M annually as a result of medication non-compliance and the cost of preventable hospitalizations growing to $15B/year, motivating the steward of a family's care is more important than ever. With the release of the latest upgrade to its flagship product, Compliance for Life - iReminder, LLC is meeting this challenge by offering greater personalization in reminder messages.

Reminders are delivered in the voice of the person who sets them up and the message can be as specific as needed for the person receiving it. So, mothers and other family "health managers" can record one set of reminder messages for an elderly parent, messages tailored to each child and messages for their spouse. And, while she is at it, she can send reminders to herself, as well. Furthermore, Compliance for Life notifies the "health manager" in real-time, as soon as their loved one misses a dose. To use Compliance for Life, family members, caregivers and case managers receive subscriptions to the service from their managed care providers, employers or pharmacies.

"Who better to remind you to take your medication than the person who cares most about your health? Knowing that a daughter cares whether her elderly mother is taking her medication or that a physician is concerned with her patient's well-being is a major motivator to staying on medication," said Amy J. Yoffie, CEO of iReminder.

"Everyone I know who cares for an elderly parent or a sick child worries about whether they are taking medication and feels guilty when they don't have a chance to check up on them during the day. Knowing they will be notified if the family member does not take their medication is a great stress reliever," she added.

Prior to Compliance for Life disease management companies, managed care organizations - and families - have had to rely on labor intensive and costly intervention programs, such as Directly Observed Therapy (DOT), where a health care worker directly administers, observes and documents the patient's ingestion or injection of a medication. With Compliance for Life's "call me" feature, the person setting up a reminder can record messages tailored for each member of a family's healthcare network and the system will notify her if the medication is not taken.

Compliance for Life also has a place in disease management companies, pharmacy benefit management firms, and managed care organizations, where health coaches set up the reminders, deliver targeted messages to each patient and as monitor patients' compliance in real time. Its Patient List Report lets health coaches quickly determine the level of overall compliance of each patient they work with, enabling them to focus on severely non-compliant patients. The system can be integrated into existing programs or offered as a stand-alone service. Compliance for Life is licensed to companies in the healthcare sector, large employers, and non-profits, which, in turn, offer it as a direct-to-consumer program.

iReminder offers a software as a service (SaaS) model to managed care organizations, employers and pharmacies so they can offer Compliance for Life's patent-pending technology to their customers without burdening their IT department. Alternatively, licensees can install the Compliance for Life technology on their own IT platform. Both models allow licensees to private label the system.

iReminder, LLC

iReminder, LLC a healthcare technology company, has developed Compliance for Life (CFL), a scalable adherence system with unique personalization features for message, mode and timing of delivery. It offers tools that let patients build a healthcare network of family members, caregivers and case managers who support their compliance.

http://www.iReminder.com