According to The New England Healthcare Institute, one third to one half of all patients do not take their medication properly. Some studies peg the related costs to the US healthcare system at $100 billion annually.
The Electronic Medication Management Assistant (EMMA) has the potential to improve the health of millions of patients while reducing medicine compliance costs dramatically. EMMA is a machine that resides in the patient’s home. EMMA’s patients receive their prescribed drugs in blister cards rather than bottles. Each blister card is fed into EMMA which reads the blister cards’ bar codes and serial numbers.
When a prescription is filled, the pharmacist updates that patient’s record electronically and INRange (the Company that developed EMMA) checks for potential conflicts among the new drug and the other drugs in the patient’s drug ensemble as well as designs the proper drug dispensation routine. EMMA is smart enough to withhold a mid-day drug if the patient neglected to take a morning drug and prevents overdosing by not dispensing more of a drug than allowed.
The result is that EMMA only dispenses the proper medicine when it should be taken. EMMA activates alerts – such as causing its screen to flash as well as sending texts and emails – when the drugs are to be administered. EMMA can even send an email to a family member when the patient refrains from taking their medicine.