Remember those word problems you had in grade school math? Well, here’s an adult version for you:
You are a patient who just had surgery. You come home at 9 pm, loopy after an exhausting day, and open the bag containing six bottles of pills that the hospital sent with you. You are to take Pill A three times/day, Pill B every four hours, Two of Pill C every six hours, Pill D once per day, Pill E once per day, and Pill F only if needed. What pills do you take now?
It’s a real-life scenario that has me wondering why someone hasn’t invented a medicine dosage app — like the loan calculators where you plug in how much you want to borrow at what rate and it spits out a schedule. Don’t we have the technology for an app where you could plug in the above variables and it would produce a schedule — take Pill A now, Pill B at 1 am, etc.? Not only would it be easier on the patient, but it would also create a higher likelihood that the correct dosage was taken.
There were clear directions on the bottles pertaining only to the individual medicine but no one provided information that created a solution in the aggregate. If you are responsible for sharing information that has multiple components, spend the time to curate a message that reflects the whole instead of the pieces. Everyone who receives it will thank you.
