Upstate Now Offers Talking Prescription Bottles for Visually-Impaired or Non-English Speaking Patients

Upstate Medical University’s outpatient pharmacy now offers talking prescription bottles to better serve its population of visually impaired and non-English speaking patients.

The program, ScriptAbility, uses an RFID text-to-speech technology, and a Scrip Talk Station Reader or app, that enables patients to hear their medication information without having to read the bottle’s label. RFID text-to-speech technology refers to a system where an RFID tag, which holds encoded data, is read by a device that then converts that data into spoken words.

The prescription bottles look the same as always but have the RFID chip on the bottom, created by special software at the pharmacy. The patient places the bottle onto the small reader device or on Apple or Android phone to hear the information. Patients can hear all their vital prescription information read out loud, including the drug name and dosage, instructions, warnings and contraindications, pharmacy information, doctor name, and prescription number and date. It can read the information in 25 different languages.

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