Hi everybody, I’m Rob Rothfarb. I’m going to talk a little bit about an application I’ve been writing to help track my Anti-Coagulation Therapy. That’s a long fancy work for what people have heard commonly as blood thinning.
About four years ago I had to start taking this medication and have to take it for the rest of my life. What is this therapy exactly? It’s oral medication with warfarin, also known as Coumadin. It requires frequent blood testing and a lot of dose adjustments to keep the patient in their range for the drug in your blood.
It actually increases the time for your blood to clot, to help prevent blood clots from forming. So as opposed to the slow food movement it’s kind of like the slow blood clotting movement.
It’s expressed in the value called the International Normalized Ratio, otherwise known as INR.
With quite a lot of medical conditions such as Atrial fibrillation, DVT, and prostatic heart valves like I have that require people to take medication in the US and a lot of people in the worldwide take it.
It’s important to be adherent to the therapy and to be careful with your diet, and taking supplements and any type of (Ensads? 01:26) and eliminating alcohol consumption to be compliant with the therapy to make sure that it’s doing its job and keeping you safe as a patient.
I believe that tracking your own INR if you’re on this medication is important to help you stay inherent to your therapy, to be as safe as possible on the drug, and to have an awareness of how the therapy is going.
Over time I’ve experimented with tracking myself in different ways using paper journals, spreadsheets and most recently to develop an actual application that helps me to have this information about what to do and when to test next on the go and in my pocket at all times.
So I’m just launching this application this week. It’s called INR Journal and it’s an android application that allows you to at a glance look at exactly what dose you’re supposed to take on a given day, and when your next blood draw date is and what your three months blood test values are, so you can look at how the therapy is going.
It also lets you set a target range for your therapy and you can see it in this screen here, there is a couple of numbers at the top here that represent my specific target range, also the specific medication that you take and reminders for when to take the medication.
One of the things that happen to patients who take this medication is that you have to frequently change the dose. It varies based on what’s going on, and as the clinician adjusts your therapies so on any given day I might have to take a specific and different dose.
In addition to that there are often like intermittent course changes that are you know, skip the medication for today, take an extra 5mg, these kind of happen on the go and it’s important to keep track of them. So the app helps you keep track of those, as well as letting you add notes about how your therapy is going and anything that you think that might be important to bring up with the clinician and when you have a visit to either to review your results and to check how your therapy is going.
A daily alarm goes off and tells me how much of this medication to take, including any temporary adjustments that I have to keep track of.
I can browse the long view of my data, and in particular I can keep track of which blood tests were done in the lab and which was were done by my own self-testing. That’s the notation on the right. That’s important to be able to cross check between these meters that do INR tests and the lab results.
Graphical view of my data lets me look at these course changes that happen with my medication o that I can follow what’s going on and to make sure to stay compliant with their therapy and mention anything that might be important to that. so I can see a year of my data here and the range, and in and out of the range periods and when those course corrections happen.
The most important thing it lets me do is it know what to do and when to do it to get insight as to how my therapy is going on this medication. And to be able to have a conversation with the doctor to refer quickly when I’m in a doctor’s office to notes that might be important for them to consider in adjusting my medication.
I think be able to be on the same page having similar view as to what a clinician has is important for a patient to be able to stay on their medication correctly and to know what’s going on and to be able to ask questions.
Thanks.
