TOM – Pill & Tablet Reminder - Interview with the developer of a fantastic app

Did you have any prior development or coding experience?

The development of TOM Medications is carried out entirely by our partner bitsfabrik in Austria. We have already worked together successfully for many years.

What was the most challenging aspect of developing mobile app?

TOM offers a holistic view of therapy management with many features for the chronic disease patient. Although the tablet reminder is a relatively simple function, it was a big challenge for the many different types of devices and settings such as battery saving functions to still be able to send the push messages reliably to the thousands of TOM users every day.

_{Sven Beichler - Founder and CEO of TOM Medications}

The interviewee, Sven Beichler, is the Founder and CEO of TOM Medications. He is the father of three children and lives in Switzerland. He is a serial entrepreneur with a focus on high-quality digital products for users. Sven started TOM Medications in 2020 for a journey to increase adherence to therapy and to provide the best digital solution for chronic patients, Today, for the patients TOM is a powerful instrument to make it easier to follow your therapy and for healthcare providers an anonymous engagement platform to access TOM patients directly through the app.

Name a few of your favorite apps and reason you love them.

Lifesum: A good app for nutrition education and with equally good UX.
Slack: Always good and valuable for collaboration in our international team.
Streaks: Simplicity at its best. Motivates not to give up.

How long have you been working on this app?

We have worked for 1 year only with a test version and 100 users. After that we continued to develop 80% of TOM Medications and collected over 20'000 feedbacks with 2000 users for another year. Based on this, we finished building the medication manager. TOM was thus developed 100% on the basis of customer opinions.

What need of the user did you have in mind when developing this app?

Increased therapy adherence, simple handling despite complex disease patterns, exclusive focus on user benefits. 100% anonymity and no data octopus.

In what way do you think your app is better than similar apps on the market? Please describe in detail what innovation you think you bring and what you are proud of in your app.

There are a lot of pill-only reminder apps on the market. Most of them have only a few installations and even fewer active users. When it comes to chronic diseases, it's about getting real value for your therapy, not just having fun. We have managed to have one of the most active communities of chronic users in the TOM app. An average user has 12 interactions per day in the TOM app. The extremely high level of engagement and customer retention in TOM makes the app unique. We owe this exclusively to our users. They spoke to us for over 2 years and we listened and still do. Every day, to fulfill our mission: "Making people healthier again".

What are your future plans and expected features of the coming new versions of this app?

The TOM app started as a pure support for taking medication and transformed into therapy support in general and yet with very specific functions to increase adherence. Besides the medication reminder, a pharmacy cabinet was added to manage the pills. Also, a comprehensive health report to share with your doctor. Therapy monitoring also includes a variety of medical measurements and personal activities, tracking your mood and pain levels, and much more.

We are constantly developing the TOM app. Currently, the medicine cabinet is being expanded so that it can be shared with several users. And we are developing a platform in TOM that will allow healthcare providers to offer their services anonymously to their target group in the TOM community. The user in TOM then decides whether he is interested or not. We are convinced that this targeted offering of added value will again massively increase engagement in TOM.

Assuming new users of your app are reading this page. What do you want to ask them to do (contact you about X, Share the app, etc.)?

The TOM app has been developed for all people who are looking for a simple yet powerful support in their therapy. And we look forward to continuing to receive constructive feedback and suggestions for improvement from our anonymous TOM users in the future. With the thankfully positive reviews in the app stores and especially with the support of our community, we will be able to make TOM even more valuable every day. Thank you for that!