About Us
Why SimPillRx?
SimPillRx greatly reduces the time taken for a Nurse to prepare and give discharge instructions to patients. Oftentimes, healthcare professionals overestimate how much understanding their patients have about the medication that they are taking which leads to poor compliance. This often results in post-discharge complications. Our electronic method has also reduced the nurse’s time to prepare the discharge instruction to 3 minutes from 20 minutes and greatly increased the positive patient experiences as measured in our surveys. Patients have also reported that our medication sheets are easy and simple to read and allow them to view their medication information on their own time. We have streamlined the medication education and discharge instruction process for both patients and nurses.
Our Process
The Bone Marrow Transplant Unit at Temple University Health System used online platforms to print out medication pages for the medications that their patients were taking. The Hospital routinely prescribes around 15 medications per patient which resulted in each patient taking home 45 pages of medication information. We realized that giving discharge instructions for up to 15 medications was very cumbersome for the nurses and patients. Our goal was to create a way where patients can view their medications, reasons for use, and side effect, and have all the information in a simple, easy fashion. To do this, a binder was created with interchangeable Velcro medication cards. Each card contained the name of the medication, its uses, the key side effects, and a QR code that was linked to a full description of the medication. Nurses would take the specific medications out of the binder, put them together and scan them. This was still very cumbersome for the nurses, but it allowed us to reduce the number of pages given to patients to 3 pages per patient. We realized that a more efficient way to do this would be to make the process digital. Over 90% of our patient population has access to an internet connection to scan QR Codes. Marketing materials from cars to TV commercials all have QR Codes, so we decided to adopt this future trend to benefit our nurses and patients. Now, we use this website so that Nurses can just click the medications they want to print out and a sheet will print with the name of the medication, its uses, key side effects, and a QR for more information on the medication. Nurses can also print out Spanish pages for our large Spanish population.
Meet the Team
Anika Rastogi
Hi! My name is Anika Rastogi and I am a sophomore in high school. I am an avid learner and love to get involved in my community. I am a part of the Health Careers Club at my high school.
While doing data analysis for the pulmonary department at Temple University Hospital, I learned a lot about how the cost of care is very high as a result of patients not always understanding their discharge instructions which can lead to readmissions. I learned about the importance of health literacy and the concerns that patients have about their discharge medications, through which SimPillRx was born.
Barbara Butkiewicz
Hi! My name is Barbara. I have been a nurse for over 30 years. I have master's degrees in business administration and nursing. Currently, I am employed as a Nurse Manager at Temple University Hospital - Jeanes Campus on 4A, the Oncology/Medical-Surgical Unit. My passion is nursing clinical excellence and the patient experience.
The high prevalence of polypharmacy is problematic for patients and impacts retention of medication knowledge. My vision was to create a way in which patients could view a list of their medications and understand them in a simple manner. Hence, SimpillRx was formed.