Slide 2 – Introduction
This is Celine. Celine’s doctor recently prescribed her a course of antibiotics for an infection.
When Celine was first prescribed her medication, she was highly motivated to take her medication. When first prescribed, she received internal cues from her body that reminded her to take her medication. After a few days, as she started to feel better, her symptoms began to wane and Celine’s motivation deteriorated. Half way through her prescription, she started to miss pills accidentally. She was no longer receiving the cue of pain from her body that acted as her reminder. Before she knew it, 7 days had passed and she had half a packet of pills left over.
Slide 3 – Introduction
This is a common problem with the World Health Organisation estimating that up to 50% of medication is not being taken correctly.
Slide 4 – Introduction
The aim of this project is to develop a tool for people like Celine, who have difficulties remembering to take their short-term prescription.
The hypothesis is that developing a tool to help people remember to take their short-term medication will increase the number who complete their prescription.
The assumption is that reminding people will help them take their medicine
Slide 5 – Experiment
I designed an experiment where I recruited 10 participants to test my hypothesis. The participants all took a placebo medication (Tic-Tac’s) twice a day for 7 days. These 10 participants were split into two groups. An intervention group and a control group.
The intervention group received a reminder SMS daily at the times they were supposed to take their medication and the control group were left to their own devices. At the end of this one week period, I measured how many people completed their prescription and how many pills each participant missed.
Slide 6 – Findings
All participants did pretty well (except one) at finishing their prescriptions. There was one outlier – TMR07 who missed quite a few pills in comparison to the others.
Group A was better at taking their medication correctly; on time and the correct dosage
Slide 7 & 8 – related experiments
Seemingly small changes can have a big impact. The NHS tested the impact of a change in the message sent to patients who had an upcoming appointment. Changing the wording reduced the percentage of no-shows from 11.1% to 8.4%. This change, on a large scale, had a massive cost saving impact.
Slide 9 – next steps
- Run stage two of the experiment
- Analyse the findings
- Design new experiments