Tips For Staying On Top Of Your Medications

For the 55 percent of Americans taking prescription medications, four pills per day are the average. Keeping up with your prescriptions can be challenging, especially if you’re taking multiple pills each day. You may have one prescription you take in the morning, one with lunch, and one with dinner, plus a couple that you take multiple times every day.

As challenging as it is to keep up with it all, though, missing a pill can be dangerous or, at the very least, detrimental to your long-term health. The good news is, there are plenty of tools now available that can help you stay on top of it all.

Setting a Routine

The more you can make your medications a part of your daily routine, the more likely you are to remember to take them. One of the best things you can do is pair it with mealtime, which also helps with those pills that must be taken with food. Make a list of all of your medications and find the best way to work them into your daily schedule.

Specialized Pillboxes

Pillboxes have been around for decades, but if you haven’t shopped around for one in a while, you might be surprised how many options there are. In addition to standard one-box and multiple-box per day seven-day pillboxes, you can also get 31-day boxes. There are also now pillboxes with reminder alarms to ensure you never miss a dose.

Mobile Apps

If you have a mobile device, you don’t need a special pillbox. There are plenty of apps on the market that will let you set an alarm, reschedule a pill if you don’t need to take it, and check off that a pill was taken. But perhaps the best thing about an app is that it logs a history of every pill you take, as well as what time you took it.

Alarm-Based Devices

By now, everyone has seen the watch timer that goes off at designated reminder times. But the market has expanded well beyond wristwatches. You can also buy timer caps for your prescription bottles and alarm clocks that will let you set multiple reminders throughout the day. It’s important to find the type of device that will work best with your day.

Pill Reminder Services

There are also services you can order that will keep you on track. One lets you sign up to have them ring your phone or send a text throughout the day when it’s time for a dose. Another is a service that packages up all your medications in convenient packets that come with instructions written on it. You can set this up by mail, but pharmacies like CVS now offer it for an additional charge.

With so many tools now available, staying on top of your medication schedule is easier than ever. However, different tools work best for different people, so it’s important to look at all the options and choose the one that will be most likely to keep you on track.