September 18, 2011 | Read Time: 1 minute
To give young transplant patients a friendly reminder to take the medicine that keeps their bodies from rejecting the new organs, the University of Iowa Children’s Hospital is turning to Facebook.
Patrick Brophy, who oversees treatment of kidney disease at the hospital, worked with the technology staff to create Iowa MedMinder. The application creates a pop-up box of all the medications a patient needs to take that day, which appears on his or her Facebook page. Patients click off each of their required drugs as they take them, and the software sends the information to their doctors.
According to Dr. Brophy, teenagers and young adults usually are good about taking their medicine right after a transplant, but that doesn’t always last.
“They get to feeling better, they start hanging out with their friends, and they stop taking their medications,” he said in a written statement. “They’re at the time of their lives when they should be out having fun with their friends,” but instead find themselves facing another kidney transplant.
Dr. Brophy hopes to test the new software this fall with a group of 13- to 21-year-old transplant patients, the age group he says that most often do not take their medicine regularly.
For more information: Go to http://www.uihealthcare.org.
