Precise Prescription System™
The Precise Prescription System™ is an exclusive medication dispensing package offering unique advantages over current methods. Until now this system has only been available to clients in hospitals and health care facilities.
Clients and caregivers can now, using the Precise system in their own home, benefit from improved compliance, decreased medication errors, reduced complexity and avoid the inconvenience of multiple prescription bottles.
The Precise Prescription System™ provides one convenient box containing a strip of individually sealed pouches – each containing the specific medication dosage required for the period of time indicated on the label. Each securely sealed pouch displays the client’s name, date and time of consumption along with a physical description of the medication.
Why is the Precise Prescription System different?
The main underlying difference is that the Precise Prescription System is an innovative adherence system as opposed to an adherence tool. The difference is significant in that the system approach is geared towards providing a package that addresses each of the five dimensions of medication adherence. Addressing each of the five areas of medication adherence is necessary if the health care practitioner is going to accomplish their goal of having the client follow their prescribed medication regimen and the client is going to fully benefit from the medications that they have been prescribed.
How is the Precise Prescription System different?
Current medication adherence packages concern themselves primarily with chronic medications taken at regular intervals. Unfortunately, this does not meet the needs of many clients. The best that these traditional medication adherence packages can accomplish in terms of facilitating irregular dosing regimens is accommodating the once weekly or once monthly medications used to treat osteoporosis. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of the currently available medication adherence packaging is designed to provide for only four dosing periods a day. For many clients, this means that they need more than one set of packages to meet their dosing schedule needs. As soon as more than one medication adherence package is required for a client, the chances of non-adherence increase significantly.
The adherence packaging that forms the Precise Prescription System is able to accommodate six different dosing periods a day. Moreover, the dosing periods are 100% customizable both in terms of times per day and day of the month. For example, a client could have their medications scheduled throughout the day for 6 am, 10 am, noon, 2 pm, 5 pm, 7 pm, and 10 pm. Another client who works the night shift could have their medication scheduled for 11 pm, 2 am, 5 am, 8 am, 11 am, and noon. There is also no requirement to have dosing times on the hour. Clients who take the medication domperidone ½ hour before meals could have a dosing regimen of 7:30 am as well as 8 am. If they so choose the clients can have medications offset by just one minute (e.g. 8 am and 8:01 am) for medications that need special handling (e.g. fanisteride).
Once we move away from dosage schedules that occur on a daily basis, tradition medication adherence packaging quickly loses its effectiveness. Many medication dosing regimens including chemotherapy and corticosteroid tapering will have differing number of pills per day and may also skip days in the month. The Precise Prescription System has the ability to place medications on any day of the month and make changes, if necessary, to any new regimen that is prescribed. For example, we have a cancer client who is starting a chemotherapy regimen on March 2nd and needs to take doses on the 5th, 7th, 15th, 23rd, and 25th. This is possible with the Precise Prescription System. Let us suppose that the blood work from that same cancer client indicates that they have to delay their chemotherapy regimen and reduce the number of days being taken. The new dates could be set for the 13th, 17th, 24th and 28th.
Moving beyond tablets and capsules, an effective adherence package will also be able to accommodate other medications that do not come in tablet or capsule form. This is not to say that we would be putting inhalers or liquids in the packages, but the Precise Prescription System does have the ability to label the packages with reminder tags to inform the client that they should be using their inhaler, insulin, eye drops, patches, etc. These reminders can be listed alongside the other tablet and capsule medications so that the client need not search elsewhere for their reminder packets. Non-prescription medications can be placed in the packages as well. Once we have the tablet and capsule form medications (both prescription and non-prescription) as well as the reminders for the inhalers, patches, eye/ear drops, insulin, etc., the Precise Prescription System medication adherence packaging forms an all in one package for the client. Beyond the benefits incurred from the improved medication adherence, clients also benefit in other ways (e.g. they only need to bring their medication adherence package with them when having to leave for the hospital in an emergency instead of having to gather up all of their medications as all of the medications and their dosing times are listed on the outside of the box).
The adherence packages themselves are each labelled with the medication name, dose, number of doses, and physical description along with the name of the client, date, dosing time and whether or not it is the only packet of medication to be taken at that time or if it is 1 of 2, 2 of 2, 1 of 3, etc. The packages are also designed so that they can be torn easily for clients who suffer from arthritis and for those clients who have difficulty swallowing their medications, the pills can be crushed inside the packet before opening the packet and administering the crushed medications.
All of the above features of the Precise Prescription System medication adherence packaging are offered at no extra cost to the client.