Strip Count

Blue gas

About this app

Every pharmacy has a handful of customers on the same medicines month after month. Somebody hands over a box of sixty, the customer says two a day, and both of them privately work out that it will last about a month. Nobody writes the date down. So the supply ends on a Tuesday, the customer notices on the Thursday, and the counter finds out on the Saturday when they walk in - or does not find out at all.

Strip Count does the arithmetic nobody does. Record a dispense - what it was, how much, and how many a day - and it turns that quantity into a date. Sixty tablets at two a day is thirty days, counted from the morning it was handed over rather than from today, and rounded down, so the app never claims a day the customer has not actually got. It shows its working while you type, because a number an app invented should be checkable rather than trusted.

Every supply is then drawn as what it physically is: a foil strip with one pressed dome for each day it still covers. Days already gone are pushed through and the foil is torn where they were. Somebody with three weeks in hand is a full strip. Somebody to ring today is three domes clinging to the end. Somebody who ran out and has not been back is bare torn foil with a mark down its edge. The counter screen is those strips in one column, fewest days left first, so this week's work is simply the top of the screen - there is nothing to filter, sort or switch between, and no dashboard of counts to read before you get to it.

Some things cannot be turned into a date, and the app says so rather than guessing. A medicine taken as needed has no rate, so it gets no domes, no date, and no place in the queue - just the words on the strip. Filling that gap with an assumed rate to keep the list tidy would be the app making something up about somebody's medicine, and it will not do it.

What makes the record worth keeping past the first month is the gap it can see. Add up the days of supply a person has been handed since their first dispense, set that against the days that have actually passed, and the difference tells you something neither figure does alone: this customer has collected a hundred and twelve days' supply for the last hundred and thirty days, and usually collects five days after their supply runs out. Somebody coming back a week early every month is quietly building a cupboard of stock. Both are shown as a plain number of days and nothing more.

Strip Count counts days, and that is the whole of it. It gives no medical advice of any kind, recommends nothing, warns about nothing, and holds no drug database, interaction checker or dosing guidance. It ships knowing no medicine names at all - every one in it is a word somebody typed at the counter. It is the pharmacy's own record rather than an app for the person taking the medicine, and it sends nobody anything. It asks for a counter reference and a first name, and has nowhere to put an address, a date of birth, a telephone number, a condition or a prescriber. There is no money in it either: a dispense is a quantity handed over, not a sale. Everything stays on the phone, and it works behind a counter with no signal exactly as it works anywhere else.

What’s new

Initial release