If a Thing Is Worth Doing, It Is Worth Doing Well

A cardiologist used that line as the title of a 2023 editorial in JACC: Advances on why patients with atrial fibrillation stop taking, or underdose, the one drug that prevents their stroke (Camm, 2023). The line itself is an old proverb, and it describes what has driven our approach to patient technology. When Mukti Gande and I began thinking about the solutions we needed, collaborating with Steve Feldman, our founding clinical advisor and adherence expert, it was clear that doing it well meant capturing the dose amounts dispensed, with the precision needed for clinical trials and for clinical care. Once the build was under way, working with our engineering experts, including Nestor Wiegandt, and our partners at Porticos, that specification grew into the several robust versions of the product we use today.

What MyAide™ records, at the level of the individual dose:

• Time of each dispense
• Dispense timing against the scheduled dose window
• Quantity dispensed, measured by weight (pill count for oral solids, grams for topicals)
• Quantity dispensed against the prescribed dose range
• Storage temperature of the medication
• Identity of the person dispensing, authenticated by a code entered in the app

The timing, quantity, and user measures of the Smart Dock were validated independently at the University of Houston College of Pharmacy (Wallace, Ganna, and Aparasu, 2025). The dock agreed with the reference record 100 percent of the time on the number of pills dispensed and on the identity of the user, and 99 percent of the time on the time of dispense. Across those product versions, we have captured precise dosage data on tens of thousands of patient dosing events.

This level of measurement matters most where the dose itself is the clinical question: narrow therapeutic index drugs, direct oral anticoagulants, medications for alcohol use disorder, oral oncology agents, and any regimen that is titrated or taken as needed.

This dose-level record is what our AI model, now in development, is built on. Its job is to fit the engagement to each patient, and it works from what was actually dispensed.

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