Taking different medications regularly, and as recommended by your clinician, is utmost important. It provides you with the best chance to attain the goal of optimal health: no side effects and no interactions. On the flip side, medication noncompliance and mix-ups can have serious and potentially disastrous consequences.

Of course, managing medication isn’t easy, especially if there’s a red, green and blue pill in front of you at the same time. But it certainly isn’t impossible. Think of it as a team approach involving your nurse, doctor, pharmacist, friends and family, and of course YOU, the captain of the team. It’s you who gets to decide which medicine you’re going to take. Only you can work together with the team to discover ways to best manage your meds.

To make it easier for you and your folks, we’ve laid out some tips to organize your medications and related prescriptions.

Obtain Medication’s Correct Identification

Using a pill identifier from LowestMed or another similar vendor, to obtain pills’ correct information is pretty straightforward. You just need to enter any detail about a medication’s physical appearance, and you’ll get a list of possible medications that match the information you entered. The more details you can provide about the medication, the better your chances of obtaining its correct identification; color, shape, and imprints are the most defining and useful characteristics when identifying a drug. Once you obtain correct information, you can match it with your prescription to ensure you continue taking medications in correct order.

Tie Your Doses to Your Daily Activities

You can integrate your medication into a daily routine like dinner time, after a shower, or when you wake up in the morning. Keep your pills in an easy-to-find (but secure, away from curious pets and toddlers) spot as a visual cue. Soon you’ll begin taking your meds in routine, just like you brush your teeth in routine. However, remember to protect your prescription drugs from extreme cold or heat, and don’t leave them in steam. If they need to be stored in a fridge, consider using a sticky note as a reminder to grab them when you open the refrigerator for any purpose.

Seek Help from Family and Friends

You’ll find that some people within your family and friends circle take medication, and building a team to remind each other to take their medication can be quite helpful. If you live by yourself, maybe a relative can text you each night or morning, when they also take their prescription. Likewise, if you have a loved one who takes different medications, consider assisting them in creating a pill box, printing out pictures of their drugs, and then writing in a large font what each drug is used for, its dose and its name. Large writing for drug description and prescription bottle printouts can be very handy as senior patients begin losing their eyesight.

Work with Your Healthcare Specialist to Simplify Your Routine

If you take several pills per day, your healthcare provider may be able to find a similar medication that just needs to be taken once each day. If you’re required to take individual doses because you need to be careful about mixing drugs with other supplements due to drug interaction, your doctor may be able to find to prescribe medications that don’t result in an interaction.

With these tips, taking the right medication at the right time would no longer seem like a mountain to climb.