Founder's Note #4: Taking Your Medication is the Easy Part
Or: Why organizing my pills only solved half the problem.
Intense Pill Cases Bucket of medication
A few weeks ago, I sat down to organize my medications.
This is a fairly regular occurrence in my house. Every few weeks, I gather my collection of medication bottles, line everything up, and spend an hour or more filling my pill organizers.
My organizers have snarky phrases on the front because, quite frankly, if I'm going to spend an hour sorting pills, I deserve a little entertainment.
And they work really well, especially with helping me to know what I'm going to take on that day and when.
Problem solved, right? HA. If only. 😂
It took me a while to realize that organizing my pills and managing my medications are two very different jobs.
My pill trays solve the first one beautifully. The second? Well, that's where things get interesting.
The pill is only one part of the job
When a doctor prescribes a new medication, the instruction usually sounds pretty straightforward.
Take this medication at this dose, this many times a day.
But the actual work surrounding that instruction is rarely straightforward.
For me, medications can change depending on where I am in my infusion cycle.
Some need to be taken at specific times. Some with food. Some without. Some are daily, some weekly, and others are only needed in certain situations.
Then there are dosage changes, refills, side effects, and making sure the appropriate doctors know what has changed.
And, of course, I still have to remember to actually take the medication. (Sometimes I just don't wanna. 😂I know the other chronic illness baddies out there will back me up on this one!)
The pill organizer helps with part of this and the day to day "take these at lunch"
But there's a substantial gap that the pill organizer doesn't solve for.
It doesn't tell me why I'm taking something.
It doesn't necessarily help me remember when the dosage changed or which doctor prescribed it.
And it definitely doesn't solve the inevitable conversation at every appointment: "What medications are you currently taking?" or "Any changes to your medications?"
Suddenly, I'm mentally reconstructing medication changes on the fly while also trying to remember if I've told the doctor this information already.
Which brings me to the actual problem I've been trying to solve.
Organizing the pills isn't the same thing as organizing the information surrounding them
I think it's easy to look at medication management as a relatively contained workflow.
You have a medication.
You have a dosage.
You have a schedule.
You record whether the patient took it.
Done.
Except that's not the only part of what the patient is managing.
There's a whole web of information connected to each medication.
Who prescribed it?
Which pharmacy fills it?
What changed?
When did it change?
What symptoms or side effects have I noticed?
What information do I need at my next appointment?
Here's the part that gets particularly interesting to me: I don't always remember information in the order that a software application expects me to.
Sometimes I remember the medication name. Sometimes I remember which doctor prescribed it. Sometimes I only remember which pharmacy filled it.
And sometimes I remember the medication name so incorrectly that I'm honestly impressed anyone figures out what I'm talking about. 😣
But all three are perfectly reasonable starting points for finding the information I need.
So why should I have to start with the medication list every single time?
If I remember the doctor, let me start with the doctor. If I remember the pharmacy, let me start there.
But here's the funny thing: All three are perfectly reasonable starting points to find the information that I need when I need it. Other applications really only have one way to capture and find the information - the medication list. Maybe that's not how my brain is working that day so why is that the only way I can get what I need?
Building around the relationships
This is one of the things I'm particularly proud of in Health Harmony.
Yes, I can view my medications together. I can record dosages and schedules, track changes, log whether I've taken a dose, and add notes about symptoms or side effects.
Those are important capabilities and something that I purposely make sure that I included.
But I can also see medications in the context of my providers and pharmacies.
If I'm looking at a provider, I can see all the medications associated with them.
If I'm looking at a pharmacy, I can see all the medications associated with it.
And if I'm looking at a medication, I can see its prescribing provider and which pharmacy I can expect to get it from.
To me, medications doesn't just mean things I get from my doctors, it also means supplements that I take to support key functions of my health and where I bought them from.
While it may seem like a small design decision, it reflects something I've been thinking about throughout this entire build:
Patients don't experience healthcare one system at a time. We experience it as one life.
My medications aren't separate from my doctors. My doctors aren't separate from my appointments. And the information I need doesn't always fit neatly into the categories we've created for it.
It's the relationships between those things that matter.
Medications View Care Team View Detailed Medication View Detailed Provider View
I want Health Harmony to reflect those connections so that the information is easily accessible.
Not everything needs to be replaced by an app
If something works for the patient, there's no reason to replace it.
For example: My pill trays work. I like them. They're familiar. They solve a real problem for me. I'm not interested in replacing them just because I'm building a digital health product.
Sometimes as product managers, we can get so focused on creating an end-to-end digital experience that we forget people already have systems that work for them.
A notebook.
A spreadsheet.
A calendar.
A pill organizer with something mildly inappropriate written on the front.
The goal shouldn't automatically be to replace every one of those things.
The question I'm more interested in is:
What's still difficult even after someone has created a system that works?
For me, the answer was the information surrounding my medications.
My pill trays handle the physical organization. I don't need Health Harmony to replace them.
I need it to help me remember the things the trays can't: what changed, who prescribed what, where I get it, and what I need to know when someone asks me about it six months from now.
That's the gap I'm trying to build within.
The bigger product lesson
Patients are incredibly good at creating workarounds. We build systems because we have to. But the opportunity isn't necessarily to replace those systems.
It's to understand what they're solving, figure out what's still difficult, and build something that helps close the gaps
That's the approach I'm trying to take with medication management. My pill trays handle the physical organization. Health Harmony helps me manage the information surrounding it.
And hopefully, that means a little less time trying to reconstruct my medication history from memory.
Because I have enough things taking up space in my head. I still need somewhere to store all those commercial jingles, my favorite dad jokes, and various songs from K-Pop Demon Hunters. 😂
The question I'm taking into the next iteration:
How can Health Harmony make medication information easier to find and understand without asking patients to do even more work to maintain it?
Because the goal isn't to give patients another tool to manage.
It's to give them fewer things they have to keep in their heads.
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