Technical showcase: the drug self-management app

A patient’s ability to manage the many drugs they have been prescribed for different conditions and comorbidities (known as their medication management capacity or ‘MMC’) is one of the main drawbacks to effective care and disease control. It includes the ability to identify medications correctly and to describe how they should be taken.

A new mobile application called ‘iManageMyDrugs’, which we are developing in the iManageCancer project, enables patients to successfully manage an increasing number of prescriptions and help avoid dangerous drug interactions, side effects and outcomes due to their clinical condition.

Therefore, this application provides services for the management of prescribed drugs and to improve safety of drug intakes.

For medication management, the app offers functionality to easily create a medication plan which includes information about prescribed drug intakes like dosage, frequency, drug intake time points and corresponding reminders. The patient is also able to report occurred side effects and outcomes.

By leveraging information from public drug repositories, drugs in the medication plan are automatically checked if active ingredients within drugs affect each other’s activity when they are administered together. This action can be synergistic (when the drug's effect is increased) or antagonistic (when the drug's effect is decreased), or a new effect can be produced that neither produces on its own.

The drugs in the medication plan are also scanned for contraindications due to the patient’s reported diseases and health status. Some treatments may cause unwanted or dangerous reactions in people with allergies, high blood pressure, or pregnancy. Additionally, the app checks if a drug dosage for the patient is correct according to age and weight data recorded in the patient’s profile. The app provides supplementary functionality to view the drug taking history, and to get structured information about a drug like instruction leaflet.

The app is multifunctional and also provides the possibility to record measurement results when using medical devices for blood pressure, weight, and temperature monitoring. Devices from specific vendors can be directly connected with smartphones via Bluetooth Low Energy protocol.

But what about the technical side of things? The measurements are stored in the local database and optionally in the iManageCancer data store using the security infrastructure of the platform. They can be viewed as graphs on the smartphone and on the iManageCancer portal as well. The patient can edit their profile information. Further to this, they can take pictures of their paper-based clinical documents and add them to their own health profile and get additional information on terms that he does not understand.

The medical documents can be optionally synchronized with the iManageCancer portal. A further optional functionality in the app is the possibility to get guided management support for specific problems that challenges cancer patients such as pain, fatigue and febrile neutropenia. If the patient activates support specific care flows, the app requests patients to execute different tasks regularly (e.g. for performing measurements or answering health enquiries). They assess the patient’s health status and provide personalized feedback based on their disease status.

The first version of this app for testing is due in October 2016; look out for updates nearer the time.