The present invention relates to medication adherence and automated drug administration systems in general, and more particularly, systems and methods to provide improved automated drug administration systems that also promote medication adherence.
The issue of medication adherence is a well-known problem in the field of health care. Positive patient outcomes from treatment require that therapies are delivered or performed as prescribed. However in the course of medical treatment, patients may be prescribed medication, treatments, or other therapeutic regimens which are administered on an outpatient basis, where the patient may not be directly observable by a health care practitioner. Although often, when a medical procedure, treatment, or therapy is performed on an outpatient basis, the procedure or treatment may be self-administered by the patient, not all patients are competent or reliable, and here medication compliance is an issue.
Although in some cases, family, friends, or designated caregivers may assist in delivery of outpatient medical care, in many situations obtaining the reliable assistance of a capable, willing, and responsible human caregiver may be problematic or prohibitively expensive. Thus in many situations such as home, outpatient clinic, nursing home, or other outpatient situations, there is a need to independently verify that the patient has followed the therapeutic regimen as prescribed. The need to independently verify patient compliance with a prescribed therapeutic regimen is often described in the art as “medication adherence” or “medical adherence”. Various prior art drug administration systems have been proposed which use a variety of technologies and methods to promote and verify patient medication adherence.
Techniques used by some prior art systems to dispense medicine may include ejecting containers containing a single dose of medication. These prior art medical dispensing containers are frequently configured to permit dispensing of only a single medication, or multiple medications, in a sequential manner.