Medication Tracker

Words to know

Pharmacies and insurance companies use a lot of special words. This page explains the ones you will see in Medication Tracker, in everyday language. You don’t need to learn them all before you start. Come back here when a word on a screen is new to you.

Prescriptions and the pharmacy

Word	What it means
Prescription	A doctor’s order for a medicine. It says what to take, how much, and how many times the pharmacy may fill it.
Prescriber	The doctor, nurse practitioner or other clinician who wrote the prescription.
Fill	One time the pharmacy gives you a medicine, whether you pick it up or it comes by mail.
Refill	Another fill of the same prescription.
Refills left	How many more times the pharmacy may fill the prescription. The label usually prints it. When it reaches zero, you need a new prescription.
Prescription number or Rx number	The number the pharmacy gives a prescription. It is printed on the label. A new prescription gets a new number.
Days supply	How many days one fill should last if you take it as directed. The pharmacy label or receipt shows it.
Quantity	How much medicine was in the fill, such as 30 tablets or 2 pens.
Pharmacy	The store, mail-order service or supplier that gives you the medicine.
Specialty pharmacy	A pharmacy that handles medicines that are hard to make, store or ship, such as many injections. These often take several days to arrive.
NPI	National Provider Identifier. A 10-digit number that every prescriber and pharmacy in the United States has. Patient portals often show it.
Over the counter (OTC)	A medicine you can buy without a prescription.

Insurance

Word	What it means
Insurance plan or payer	Whoever pays for a fill. Usually your insurance plan. When you pay the whole price yourself, the app calls it Cash.
Claim	The request the pharmacy sends to your plan to get paid for a fill. Each claim has a claim number.
Deductible	The amount you must pay yourself each year before your plan starts to pay.
Patient portal	Your plan’s, pharmacy’s or doctor’s website, where you can see your fills or your list of medicines. MyChart is one.
Early refill	Most plans won’t pay for a refill until most of the last fill is used up. Pharmacies call an early request “refill too soon”. The app estimates the first day your plan will pay.
Early fill percent	How much of the last fill may be left when the plan pays for the next one. Many plans allow about 25 percent. For a 30-day fill, that is about 7 days early.
Supply frame	The number of past days the plan looks at when it adds up your fills. Many plans look back about 180 days.
Prior authorization	An approval your plan gives before it will pay for some medicines. It lasts for a set time, often a year, and then you need a new one. Your prescriber asks for it.
FSA	A flexible spending account. Money set aside from your pay, before taxes, for health costs such as medicines. You usually send proof of what you paid to get it back.
HSA	A health savings account. Like an FSA, but it goes with some high-deductible plans and the money carries over from year to year.

Kinds of medicines

Word	What it means
Brand name	The name a company sells a medicine under, such as Lipitor.
Generic name	The name of the drug itself, such as atorvastatin. Many companies can sell the same generic.
Strength	How much drug is in one tablet, capsule, puff or milliliter, such as 10 mg or 90 mcg/puff.
Dose form	What the medicine looks like: a tablet, capsule, liquid, inhaler, injection and so on.
Route	How the medicine goes into the body, such as by mouth or by injection.
Package or carton	Some medicines come in boxes of a set size, such as a 2 Pack of pens. A 2 Pack and a 6 Pack are different products to a pharmacy.
Specialty medication	A medicine that is costly or hard to handle, often from a specialty pharmacy. The app reminds you earlier for these, because they take longer to arrive.
Controlled medication	A medicine with extra legal limits, such as some pain or sleep medicines. Pharmacies usually won’t fill it early, even if your plan would pay.
Release form	Some tablets let the drug out slowly, marked XR, ER or 24 HR, or after the stomach, marked DR. These are different products from the plain tablet.

Words the app uses

Word	What it means
Catalog	The list of medicine products the app knows about. It comes with about 2,850 common products. The catalog doesn’t say who takes what.
Product	One entry in the catalog: one medicine at one strength, form and package.
Tracked medication	A medicine that a person in your family takes, shown on the Medications page. It points to one or more catalog products.
Preferred name	The name you want to see for a tracked medication, such as “Metformin 1,000 mg”. You can change it any time.
Short name	The name the catalog gives a product, in the form “Brand (Generic) strength”, such as “Lipitor (Atorvastatin) 40 mg”.
Other names	Extra names a product answers to, such as an abbreviation or the way a pharmacy spells it.
Status	Whether a person is taking a medicine: Taking regularly, Taking as needed, On hold, Not started or No longer taking.
Next fill date	The day the app suggests you refill, so a small backup is still on hand. It is never before your plan will pay.
Lasts until	The day all the medicine you have recorded would run out.
Backup supply	A few days of medicine kept on hand in case a refill is late. The app keeps about 15 percent of a fill, and at least 7 days (10 for a specialty medication).
Due and Due soon	How close a refill is. By default, a refill is due when its next fill date is 3 days away or fewer, and due soon at 4 to 7 days.
Overdue	The recorded supply has run out.
Time period	A filter on the History page, such as last month or one whole year. Weeks start on Sunday.
Year so far	This year’s total on the Reports chart. The year isn’t over, so its bar has an outline and the average leaves it out.
Spending report	The printable report on the Reports tab. It lists what you paid for each fill and adds it up by person, year and medicine.

Words about the computer side

Word	What it means
Privatium	The free program that runs this app on your own computer. It keeps your records there instead of on a company’s servers.
Node	One copy of Privatium running on one computer.
RxTerms and RxNorm	Public lists of medicines kept by the United States National Library of Medicine. The app uses them to look up a medicine that isn’t in its catalog.
openFDA	A public database of the United States Food and Drug Administration. The app uses its product list for the same kind of lookup.

Conclusion

You now know the words that the screens use. The user guide shows how to do each task, and How the app works explains how the app picks the dates it shows.

Additional resources

Back to project README