When a doctor prescribes a medicine, the patient has to take a number of pills every so often. My grandmother is very old and must take 5 different type of pills, each at a specific time of day. It's easy to forget and make mix-ups – there should be a mechanism to help patients remember. Here are a few ideas from the top of my head:

• Electronic: you have a watch or a pager-sized device that keeps beeping until you confirm you've taken the pill. Disadvantage: I bet it would be a pain in the ass to program it. Some healthy people can't handle electronic watches, let alone ill people handling more complex technology.
• On paper: have the doctor print a table with check-boxes that you check each time after taking the medicine. When prescribing drugs, instead of writing with a pen (doctors have terrible writing anyway), they could just enter some information (how often take the pill and for how long) and generate a timetable. This way it's more fun and you can know for sure when you've forgotten to take the medicine. Additionally, there is a feedback mechanism – you know if you're improving or not when looking at the table.

This idea is based on the fact that checklists tend to reduce mistakes on average. In hospitals, the number of accidental deaths in surgery has dropped after nurses went through a checklist during the procedures. In what other areas could this idea be applied? What are the downsides to checklists?

POST#0078 2009-AUG-10

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