COVID-19 is undoubtedly having an impact on patient populations. During this challenging time, Talking Medicines have been doing their bit to support the Medsmart® community whilst sharing data insight from greater patient populations to add value to Government data, to help others and raise awareness of the work we are doing.
COVID-19 Tracker
The UK statistics show that there are 15,639 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Scotland and 155,000, 14,438 and 4,802 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland respectively (The Guardian). To play our part in tracking and to support our Medsmart® community we created a new version of our App – inclusive of a COVID-19 tracker. So far we have had an uptake of 2.82% across our Medsmart® community with a proportion of users confirming that they have tested positive for COVID-19, another group that think they may have COVID-19 and a further subset of users that are using this feature to state that they are unaffected. We are delighted to that there is use of the tracker already and intend to keep this feature in the App over the coming months to support users and add value to coronavirus data as time goes on. The profile of those experiencing symptoms are expressed in the infographic below:
Tracking impact of the pandemic on medicines uploaded to Medsmart®
We have also been looking at the medicines being scanned into our Medsmart® App over the last few months. We can see that over the course of the pandemic the top five medicines uploaded were: Omeprazole, levothyroxine, sertraline, atorvastatin and Ramipril. These drugs are used to treat gastric acid, hypothyroidism, depression, high cholesterol and high blood pressure respectively.
We believe that the data we collect about how people talk about their health and use their medicines can be used for good. It is important to us that we use our tools not only to connect patients with the wider healthcare system but also to connect the healthcare system back to the patients and their voices. We hope that by continuing to collate and structure data from our COVID-19 Tracker and by analysing changes in user medicine uploads we can continue to contribute to the COVID-19 effort as it enters this new “test and trace” phase.
Ref: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/09/coronavirus-uk-map-the-latest-deaths-and-confirmed-cases-near-you
