An automated medication adherence tool

Misuse of medications is a major cause of morbidity and mortality. The pervasiveness of non-adherence to medications is having significant health care implications, including costly and distressing hospitalization. This paper presents a new method for delivering medication instructions that incorporates all aspects of all medications in a regimen into one chronological schedule, rather than using an independent instruction set for each medication as is currently done. It is an automated tool that accepts as input only the name, dose, and frequency of each medication, and generates a chronological schedule that respects all medication constraints and contains the essential directions for use. The potential users of the system are health care environments in which a log of all of a patient´s medications, including over-the-counter medications, resides in one place.