Medications are an integral, often daily, part of many people's lives. Pill organizers and alarms are all great, but Apple's Health app has a medication management and reminder feature that can be set to help you remember and check off medications as you take them. take. This includes discretionary decisions.
Configure medications and your medications
Launch the Health app in iOS 16/iPadOS 16 or later, tap Browse at the bottom, then tap Drugs to begin configuration. To place medications in the Health Summary view, press the button To modify button at the top of Health, search Drugsthen tap it to pin it to the summary. You can press and hold to drag the pinned items to the top of the Edit view into the order you want.
Set up medications (left) and the Health app groups them by scheduled time (right).
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The app guides you through adding medications, which must be included in the pharmaceutical database used by Apple. This means that some supplements, like vitamins, will not appear. You can use Apple's interface to create an icon of what you're picking up that roughly matches its delivery size, shape, and color. Although Apple lets you take a photo of the US National Drug Code Directory number and other information on a prescription or bottle to match, it would be nice to be able to take a photo of the actual drug here as well.
For each medication, specify the dosage, format (such as inhaled, drops, or pill), dosage (if more than one), and a schedule that allows multiple times per day. If you are temporarily taking a medication, such as an antibiotic, you can enter the start and end dates. The feature does not support medications with different doses on different days.
As you create a list of medications, Medications automatically organizes them based on the time you set in your schedule for each. So if you take four medications at 8 a.m. each day, this appears as a group entry and functions as a single notification with each medication listed separately. Notifications can appear on multiple devices, including an iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.
Adjust notifications for better health
The most powerful feature of Medications is not creating lists but using notifications. Research shows that for prescribed medications, adherence to schedule – “treatment compliance” or “treatment compliance” – can be a key factor in health. Medicines lets you set a variety of notifications that appear and work slightly differently than standard notifications, resembling more like calendar reminders.
First, you start in the Medicines section of the Health app by swiping down to Possibilities and pressing it. (You can also come here via Settings > Health > Health notification settings.)
Medicines divide notifications into three categories. It doesn't quite present them that way, but it's worth considering them as cascading and escalating options:
- Dose reminders: First, enable dose reminders to receive a single notification each time you have set one or more notifications. This notification does not recur, but remains in your notification list until you act on it.
- Follow-up reminders: Enable trackers to get a second notification after the first for each drug or drug group. This can help refresh your memory if you weren't able to take your medication when the first notification sounded.
- Critical Alerts: Where the first two options apply to all notifications, Critical Alerts allow you to check off specific medications for which you want to receive something close to an alarm if you miss them. For some people, missing a dose could jeopardize their well-being – this option helps. A critical alert replaces the Mute and Focus states.
Critical Alerts provide a nice extra boost with a standard menu of medication options, including Record All As Taken (left). Also mark medications as taken manually in the app (right).
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There is one additional option in this space: changing time zones. If you have it turned off, medications follow your body clock. If your reminder is 8:00 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time and you change time zones eight times later, with time zone switching disabled, your reminder remains at 8:00 a.m. Pacific Time and occurs at 4:00 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time. (During summer, these are PST and GMT.)
Enabling Time Zone Change and Medication alerts you and gives you the option to adjust your reminder times to the local time zone when you cross them, so that 8 a.m. PDT set in Seattle becomes 8 a.m. GMT upon landing in London. (This can be especially fun or annoying on a long flight; even in Airplane mode, your iPhone uses GPS and will alert you as you pass through area after area.)
When you receive alerts, you can long press to act on them. You can note that you have taken the medication(s) or delay a reminder for 10 minutes. You can also note that you ignored them. If you ignore the alert, clear the notifications, or want to more accurately mark individual medication times, you can use the Medications feature in the Health app to select medications, adjust times and doses, and then mark them as taken.
My advice on critical alerts is to experiment with them: you don't want to have so many notifications that you become aggravated and start dismissing them automatically without taking action.
Over time, you can check your “medication compliance” by viewing a history of filled circles – a little nod to the forms of medications – that appear in a timeline at the top. You can also drill down into each medication and see how consistent you have been in taking it or recording it. (I consistently take my meds at 9 p.m. and forget to mark that I have them.)
This compliance history may be useful if you are not taking medications and need to increase your notifications to critical alerts, or use the data in consultation with a physician, pharmacy, or healthcare professional to develop a better plan. to stay focused.
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