If you are a person who has multiple medications and/or supplements to deal with on a regular basis, you know that managing doses, refills, and prescription appointment cycles can be a real hassle. And sometimes you can get into a rut where you consistently miss on these, causing potentially real effects on your body.
Enter CareZone, a free app downloadable on the Google Play Store (link here). CareZone is a utility app designed to help you organize your medical life; everything from medication dosing, to appointments, to emergency contacts, and important documents.
The appeal of CareZone is the all-inclusiveness of the app. This isn’t just a medication reminder tool. CareZone has the ability to tie together all aspects of you medical life. Let’s take a quick tour to see everything it can do!
Setup
Now when I say “has the ability”, please read that there is some front-loaded effort required by you the user to get the app truly to the point where it can be of the most use.
The first step is simple enough: download the free app from the Play Store. Then the small amount of work begins. CareZone will ask you to fill out several pages of information; as stated earlier, the more info you put in the more useful the app becomes.
You are given the opportunity to fill out several areas of you medical life, including current medications and supplements (you can also scan photos of the bottles into the app), physician’s contact info, emergency contact info, and health documents (insurance card, driver’s license). You can also add your appointments into the built-in calendar, vitals metrics (such as blood glucose and blood pressure), and to-do lists.
Once you have all this info input, you can then also share you info with family members and close friends, so they can help as much as possible in the event you aren’t able to access it for any reason.
The medication scanning tool is particularly useful, as it asks that you take 4 consecutive photos of each medication vessel (1 per side, presumably). This ensures you have all the information needed by a doctor or pharmacist. I can see someone going to the Pharmacy, only to realize they didn’t have all the needed information to get their question answered. This could help avoid those embarrassing and time-consuming scenarios.
App Use
Using the app itself is very simple. Actually, one of the biggest draws I see to it is that in addition to tracking the medical info on yourself, you can also input and track the medical information of another person, presumably a family member or friend who may have difficulty in maintaining this themselves. This allows a several advantages:
All info is in one place; no more post-it notes strewn everywhere as new info is gleaned.
Their schedule can be in one place and maintained, but without cluttering up your personal or base schedule already on your phone/tablet.
The information is completely shareable with your loved one, so they don’t have to feel like they’ve lost control.
There is one area where the app can be a bit intrusive, and that is in the way of ads for you to use their medication ordering and delivery service. While it may be a darn good service, it does seem like you trip over these integral adds (not pop-ups or splash pages) more often than you’d like, if you’re not interested in this service.
Conclusion
That said, CareZone is a clean, well-designed application, that allows individuals and/or their loved ones to curate an essential medical file for use when dealing with care professionals or emergency staff. It will take a nominal amount of upkeep, but the benefits make CareZone a recommended app for those who can benefit from its mission.
For more information, visit the CareZone website.