Abstract
Recently, there has been a tendency to prescribe high-dose medication and the dose regimens have become increasingly complicated. For patients prescribed such high-dose medicines to be taken once weekly, it is difficult for patients to consistently take their medication on the same day each week because the interval is too long for the patient to remember their dosing regimen.
In this study, a cell phone-based reminder system advising patients of the day and time they should take their medication was developed using the e-mail function, and the validity and usefulness of this system was evaluated.
This e-mail reminder system functions as follows : The patient accesses the server computer using their individual cell phones via the Internet and sets up the day and time when they should take the once-weekly medication ; the system will then automatically send an e-mail reminder to the patients both the day before and on the day they are supposed to take the medication.
In this study, we validated the system operation, the system registration process by patients, and the reliability of continuous operation. We also investigated whether patients recognized the incoming e-mail messages.
There were no system failures during the entire process. Of sixteen subjects (hospital clerks), ten (62.5%) completed the registration procedure without any problem. In addition, of thirty-eight subjects (nurses), thirty-five (92.1%) received all e-mails for four weeks, and thirty-one (81.5%) confirmed that they received the e-mails within one hour of the time they set up on the system. Seventeen subjects (44.7%) did not look at the e-mail message after they received it, because they knew it was the e-mail reminder to take their medication.
These findings showed that a periodic e-mail reminder service itself might contribute to patients becoming accustomed to taking medications on time because of the repeated reminder e-mails, and that a simplified registration procedure and a way to encourage patients to consistently read the message body would be required.
