Medication Solutions’s President Stephen Axelrod talks medication dispensing

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This week’s Making Rounds spotlights Stephen Axelrod, president of Medication Solutions, which helps older patients with medication adherence through an in-home medication dispensing device called TabSafe. The automated medication dispenser, which Axelrod said has approximately 1,000 customers across the country, helps older adults and their families keep track of medication adherence.

Axelrod discussed how the device works as well as his long career in healthcare, from working in emergency rooms to his current position.

How does TabSafe work?

I make a medication dispensing device about the size of a can of coffee. It’s for your grandmother. It holds a lot of different pills, reminds you to take them, and drops them from all the different cartridges into a cup at the bottom—and all the user needs to do is press the button and it dispenses the medications. But for the family members, it’s all web-enabled so you can watch your family member take their meds without calling and reminding, and you know immediately if they’ve missed anything. In addition to the medications, it can remind and put in 40 messages—lock the doors, pick up the dog, check your blood pressure, check your blood sugar, those kinds of things.

What’s one of the best changes you’ve seen or made at a place where you’ve worked?

I did something that sounds so antiquated now. I was running rehab clinics. I had about six clinics in Colorado and 15 clinics in Florida on both sides of the state, east coast and west coast. I was trying to tie the information from all of them together—the scheduling, the outcomes, reporting, everything—so that if I wanted to see if a physician who was referred to me, I could look at every clinic that they referred to. So I could learn everything about everything. But I couldn’t figure out a way to combine the information.

And I had a tech guy—this is how old I am—we were talking about dedicated phone lines from Florida to Denver. That’s the only way you could get information from the internet. And a dedicated phone line costs a lot just to use for data transfer. I had 16 clinics, so it was cost-prohibitive. All of a sudden my tech guy comes in one day and hits his forehead and goes, “The internet might be good for this.” That was the late ’90s, actually. The internet combined all the clinics. I could tell how every one of our therapists was doing, whether they had a good day, a bad day. It was great.

What healthcare trend are you least optimistic about and why?

My first issue was medical records as an emergency room doc in the ’80s. If a patient had a cardiac workup the night before at a different hospital, and came in with chest pain, I couldn’t get the records. And here we are 50 years later—and I don’t know how many billions of dollars later—and you still can’t get them. Electronic health records don’t do any good if they don’t work together.

What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your job?

The nice part about being in healthcare, whether you’re in the business of healthcare or you’re a provider in healthcare, is that your product is taking care of people. I’m a caregiver through and through. I’m a doctor first. In fact, I tell people, I’m a doctor that has business acumen. I’m not a businessman with clinical acumen. And I think that the combination of the two—looking at healthcare—has been very important to figure out what works, what’s economically feasible, and what takes the best care of people.