New app for iPhone aims to improve adherence to pediatric medications and simplify the road to wellness by giving parents and children the ability to choose the taste of their liquid medicine digitally. Doctors, nurse practitioners, pharmacists, and pharmacy technicians can also use the app to better engage with their patients and improve outcomes.

I recently read an article in the Wall Street Journal titled “Judging a Pill by Its Color.” It addressed the fact that consumers make a lot of assumptions about medication simply based on the color of the tablet or capsule. That got me thinking about all the colors we have come to take for granted in the world of pharmacy and medicine. What if the color, size or shape of the pill altered a customers medicine adherence? Color is all around us and I think we make many assumptions about the significance of what certain colors mean or imply when we see them.

Getting a pet to take their medication is not an easy task. Many pet owners are familiar with stories like covering a pill in peanut butter just to find out the dog has licked the peanut butter off while avoiding the pill or the owner trying to pretend the pill is a treat just to see their pet ignore it completely.

Bernadine Cruz, DVM, a member of the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), finds that between half and two-thirds of her clients prescribed medicine for their pets fall off after about six months. “In spite of their desire to help their pets maintain a high quality of life, they tend to have a low adherence rate,” she says. In fact, clients stop giving their pets certain medications as quickly as five or six days, she adds. As with adherence to human medication, this problem can be both dangerous and expensive. So what can a pharmacist do?

How a child perceives and understands illness depends greatly on their developmental age. Kids change remarkably through ages and stages, and it is extremely helpful for parents to recognize and understand the differences. I hope that by breaking down the stages below, I provide a little bit of insight to parents as to what children are actually capable of doing and understanding at these points of development. Hopefully parents can use this information as a guideline to structure age-appropriate conversations and efforts when dealing with their sick children.

Advancing technology has really improved our efficiency and ability to do a pharmacist’s job, but unfortunately it overshadows a significant portion of the job which has traditionally been patient contact and care. In pharmacy school, we are trained in patient counseling, but today’s patients simply click “decline patient counseling” as a quick step in the check out process. Technology is wonderful in that it helps eliminate many of the tedious steps that infringe on our time as pharmacists. Theoretically, the more technology we have at the pharmacy, the more time we should have to spare to speak directly with our customers and build lasting relationships. Unfortunately this does not seem to be the case.