MedGuide
Khalad Hasan, Debajyoti Mondal, Brent Thoma, Alexander Magnus · 2019
The information on a non-prescription (over-the-counter) medicine label helps patients to make informed decisions when purchasing a medicine. Since non-prescription medicines can be purchased without consulting a healthcare professional, there is a growing concern that people do not put enough emphasis on reading medicine label information, resulting in drug misuse with possible health consequences. In this paper, we investigate patients' use of medicine labels with the goal of developing a smartphone application to guide them toward reading the important information (e.g., warnings, dosage) on the labels. We first conducted two studies examining (i) users' rating on the information that they commonly read and (ii) healthcare professionals' rating on the information that patients should read before purchasing a non-prescription medicine. Our results revealed that patients put less emphasis on reading many information such as dosage, warnings and precautions, that the healthcare professions highly recommend the patients to read. Inspired by the findings, we designed a smartphone application to make users aware of the important information on non-prescription medicines. Along the way, we conduct a study examining different information presentation techniques to show medicine labels on smartphones, where our results show that icons and texts are more accurate and preferred techniques by users. In a further study where users explore medicines with our smartphone application, we observed a significant increase (mean 27%) in the general users' rating on the information categories that were recommended by healthcare professionals. This suggests that the users were guided to read important information by the smartphone application.