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Cranston-based Abacus Group recently won a contract to build an interactive Web-based application to improve the safety and effectiveness of prescription medications. The program is geared particularly to the elderly.
Abacus was hired by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to create MyMedicationAdvisor.com, which should be up and running within the next year.
As part of a $50 million initiative to improve health care in the U.S., the federal agency contracted Abacus to use technology to improve, among other things, communication between patients, doctors and pharmacists.
“Teaching patients how to talk to their doctors is key,” said Dr. Michael Follick, president and chief executive officer of Abacus. “(The site) creates something like a cheat sheet so when they go into the doctor they know exactly what they need to ask. Older people tend not to be as challenging towards their doctors.”
Instructing how much and how often to take medicine is another important objective of MyMedicationAdvisor.
Follick said this problem is one of the links in a chain that is keeping health care so expensive, and one of the links that the Abacus site is striving to break.
“This has a huge economic impact,” he said. “If patients don’t respond to medicine they go back for more visits with the doctor. And the problem may not be with the original medication but it may be that the patient is not following the directions. Then there is the cost of another doctor’s visit plus a new medication.”
According to a recent report by the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on the Quality of Health Care in America approximately 7,000 people die each year from medication errors. Also discovered in the Institute of Medicine’s report was that drug-related morbidity and mortality in the ambulatory setting was as high as $70 billion in any one of the last few years.
MyMedicationAdvisor’s coaching component will help users set a better routine in taking medicine. The tools include different techniques to help improve regimens such as reminder charts and graphics.
“If you have to take medicine once a day, one of the tips might be to leave your medicine near your toothbrush every night so when you get up in the morning the medicine will be right there,” said Follick. “People don’t usually forget to brush their teeth.”
The application is also intended to help people who look after the elderly and be available to doctors and pharmacists as well.
This is not the first time Abacus has worked in an arena combining interactive technology and health care. In business for the last 12 years, and working in the e-health industry for the last four years, the 25-employee company built a smoking cessation program for the workplace for Rhode Island Health, and a health care plan comparison application for Connecticut.
Aware that there are many other health care portals on the information superhighway, Follick said Abacus is different because it is an application rather than just a Web site.
Follick said integration is key to the mission of MyMedicationAdvisor.
“Medicine can’t fix everything,” he said. “But you can fix people’s behavior, and taking medication the correct way is part of that behavior.
“The goal of this site is to make sure people become more knowledgeable and are more effective communicators and users of their medicine,” he said.
