It all started with Grandma . . .
In Meeteetse, Wyoming in 1988, ninety-three year old Grandma was living alone, but had a problem. She wasn’t taking her medication correctly.
Her daughter Gayle would check on her every day and help set up her pills. No matter how they were organized – flip-top minders, baggies with notes, egg cartons with reminders . . . nothing worked.
What we finally discovered was that Grandma would take all her pills for the day before noon, take a nap and when she woke from the nap, take the next day’s pills. On two occasions she took two naps and triple dosed, resulting in costly trips to the hospital!
We thought, “Surely there must be something that will lock up her medication and dispense just what she needs when she needs it.” Just because the Mercantile general store didn’t have it, didn’t mean it didn’t exist!
We looked high and low for such a product. We asked family members who lived in big cities to ask about it. We asked pharmacists, doctors and nurses. Nobody had heard of anything like it, but all agreed it was a great idea and definitely needed by many people.
When it was clear that there wasn’t any such device, we set about making one for Grandma. When we finally got our product – which we called “CompuMed” into production in 1990, Grandma’s doctor had taken her off all her medication. She lived happily another two years!
People still take pills
In today’s ever changing healthcare world, some things are certain. People still take pills and when they take them correctly, generally good things happen. When they don’t, bad things may.
Since our beginnings with Grandma years ago, CompuMed has helped thousands of other “Grandmas” . . . and grandpas and husbands and wives, sons and daughters, friends and loved ones with medication management.
You might say that “necessity was the Grandmother of invention!”
