The medical community refers to Adherence as the degree to which a patient correctly follows medical advice, for example completing a prescription to treat an acute cough. Not surprisingly, patients are not very good at adhering to their prescriptions, there are many reasons why.
In some cases, information technologies can help improve adherence. In this post, I use Microsoft Azure’s Logic Apps service to automatically convert my family’s medical prescriptions into timely calendar entries that popup as reminders on my iPhone.
First, a brief summary for new visitors. A few years ago I started tracking key aspects of my family’s day-to-day well-being. You can browse the full list of variables I am tracking here. I use this data to conduct casual exploration and N-of-1 experimentation to address issues and opportunities affecting my family’s growth, health and happiness.
How did I do it?
Self-tracking allows me to digitally record all medications prescribed to my family. This information includes the medication’s name, its ATC code, administration route (e.g. transdermal), as well as the dosage duration, interval and frequency (e.g. every 8 hours for three days.) My goal was to turn a prescription’s dosage schedule into one or more calendar events – automatically. This would provide timely notifications throughout the prescription period.
Microsoft’s Logic Apps Service, promises to automate workflows without requiring a single line of code. I was also looking for a solution that was quick and easy to maintain and Logic Apps was pretty much exactly what I was looking for.
Logic App includes connectors for the underlying database where my self-tracking data is hosted, as well as the Google Calendar I use to manage daily events. Logic Apps made it very easy to express the workflow required to turn a prescription’s dosage schedule into events in my Google Calendar.
