Ask users for medications

When to use

Ask for medications when your product does something specific with them: shows a reminder, records adherence, includes them in a summary for a clinician, or checks something that genuinely depends on knowing them.

This is the most error-prone field in a consumer health product, for reasons that are all structural:

• A medication is at least four facts. They are name, strength, form and schedule. Readers routinely supply one of the four.
• The name is hard to type. Long, unfamiliar, easily confused, and mangled by autocorrect. Brand and generic names coexist and readers use whichever is on the box.
• Similar names differ by a syllable, and the reader may not know which one they are on.
• The source is a physical box, read at arm's length, sometimes by somebody who is unwell.

When not to use

• You want a complete, reliable medication list. You will not get one from self-entry, and designing as though you will is the underlying mistake. A self-entered list is what the reader believes they are taking. Treat it as that, say so, and never present it as a clinical record.
• You will do interaction checking. Interaction checking against a self-entered list is a clinical function on unreliable input; that is outside what this design system supports. See Is opsinjs right for this project? and Regulatory context.
• You only need adherence for one known medicine. Do not build a list; build a single item the reader confirms.
• You want the daily entry flow. Recording that a dose was taken is Daily logging.

How it works

flowchart TD
A["Add a medication"] --> B{"Is there a trustworthy source to import from?"}
B -->|"yes"| C["Import and let the reader confirm each item"]
B -->|"no"| D["Search a reference list by name"]
D --> E{"Found?"}
E -->|"yes"| F["Select; strength and form offered from the reference entry"]
E -->|"no"| G["Free text<br/>always available, never a dead end"]
F --> H["Reader adds strength, form and schedule"]
G --> H
H --> I["Review: the reader sees exactly what will be stored"]
I --> J["Stored as self-reported, with that provenance visible"]

• Search, do not spell. Type-ahead against a reference list turns an impossible spelling task into a recognition task. Match on both brand and generic names, and show both in the result so the reader can confirm they are the same thing.
• Free text is always available. A reader whose medication is not in your list must be able to record it, whether imported, unlicensed, newly approved, or simply missing. A closed list is a dead end at exactly the moment the reader is trying to tell you something important.
• Never autocorrect a medication name. autocorrect="off", autocapitalize="off", spellcheck="false". Autocorrect turns medication names into unrelated English words with total confidence.
• Never auto-select a search result. Similar names are the classic medication error, and a UI that picks one for the reader has made a clinical decision it is not entitled to make. The reader selects, explicitly.
• Strength is a number and a unit, entered separately. 500 and mg, not 500mg as a string. Offer the strengths that exist for the selected product, and allow another.
• Form matters. The forms are tablet, capsule, liquid, patch, inhaler and injection. The same name at the same strength in two forms is two different things.
• Schedule in the reader's words, then structured. "Twice a day", "morning and night", "as needed" are how people describe their medicines. Offer those, map them to structure behind the scenes, and never require the reader to fill in a cron expression.
• Review before storing. A read-back screen showing name, strength, form and schedule, in that order, is the single most effective error check available.
• Provenance is visible forever. Every entry is marked as self-reported or imported, and from where. See Data provenance and device accuracy.
• Stopping is as easy as adding, and a stopped medication is retained with its dates rather than deleted. A clinician's next question is usually when it stopped.

Content

Medication names are not translated and not sentence-cased; they are written as the source writes them. See Grammar and mechanics.

Accessibility

• No autofill token exists for a medication. autocomplete="off".
• The search field is a proper combobox: the result count is announced, the options are reachable with arrow keys, and the selection is announced. A filtered <div> list is unusable with a screen reader.
• Nothing is selected implicitly. Arrowing through results must not commit one; commitment is explicit, because a wrong commit here has a consequence.
• The free-text escape is a labelled control always present in the results area, not an option that appears only when the list is empty.
• Strength and unit are separate labelled controls in a fieldset whose legend names the medication being edited, so the announcement is "Amoxicillin, strength" rather than "strength".
• Read-back is a real page with headings, not a toast. It is the reader's chance to catch a wrong selection.
• Errors never clear the entry. Getting a medication name into a field is expensive; losing it is a WCAG 2.2 SC 3.3.7 failure and a practical catastrophe.

Research

Updates to this page

Last read through against the system on 2026-09-20. Due for review every 6 months; expiry is reported by pnpm run check:freshness.