NHS Problem
Medication non-adherence affects up to 50% of patients with long-term conditions, leading to poorer health outcomes, avoidable hospital admissions, and increased NHS costs. In England, non-adherence is estimated to cost over £500 million annually through wasted medicines and preventable complications.
Patients, particularly those with complex regimes or cognitive decline, struggle with remembering doses. This leads to disease progression, reduced quality of life, and greater demand on NHS services.
MedTracks addresses this by using personalised music cues linked to positive memories, improving adherence, reducing waste, and easing the burden on both patients and healthcare providers.
Founder Story
Memory Tracks began after I lost my aunt and uncle to dementia and witnessed how music could still reach them when other memories faded. Those moments showed me music’s extraordinary power to connect, calm, and heal.
What started as a way to ease agitation and support caregivers working with those living with dementia has developed further into MedTracks, a music-based digital health app that helps people build and maintain medication routines. By harnessing the emotional and memory triggers of meaningful songs, we’re using music to solve real-world health challenges and improve wellbeing for everyone.
The Solution
At Memory Tracks, we develop evidence-based digital tools that harness the power of music to improve health, memory, and daily quality of life.
Our latest product, MedTracks, is a digital health app using personally meaningful music to support medication adherence and wellbeing. MedTracks links prescribed medications with memorable songs, helping users, especially older adults and those with cognitive challenges, remember and enjoy taking medication as prescribed. This approach draws on neuroscience and music therapy research showing that music associated with routine tasks strengthens memory and emotional engagement.
Supported by NHS evaluation research, MedTracks demonstrates measurable improvements in adherence and mood.
Other products include Memory Tracks, an app that associates necessary care tasks with memorable songs to reduce harmful agitation during dementia care, and LifeTracks, which helps those living with ADHD manage focus on tasks and manage their days better.
Impact
MedTracks is designed to tackle one of healthcare’s most costly and persistent challenges, medication non-adherence, which is estimated to cost the NHS over £500 million annually. Our recent NHS Highland pilot demonstrated a 14.5% improvement in adherence among users, showing that personalised music cues can make a measurable difference to health behaviours.
By turning meaningful songs into medication reminders, MedTracks not only supports users to take medicines correctly and on time but also improves mood, engagement, and wellbeing. This dual emotional and practical benefit is especially valuable for people with cognitive conditions or complex medication routines.
For the health system, improved adherence leads directly to:
- fewer wasted prescriptions
- reduced hospital admissions,
- better management of long-term conditions.
In the next six months, we aim to reach 1,000 users, generating further real-world data to quantify cost savings and health outcomes.
Longer term, MedTracks has the potential to scale nationally:
- Delivering significant financial and clinical impact through improved medication adherence
- Greater independence
- Reduced burden on carers and services
All this while proving how music can be a powerful, affordable tool for behaviour change in healthcare.
