For CareZone refugees
CareZone shut down. Here’s where to move your medication list.
CareZone closed its consumer app in 2023, and unlike a normal app sunset there was no practical export path for most families. If you were the person who kept a parent’s medication list current, you lost the list, the schedule, and the reminders in one go. This page is about rebuilding that in an afternoon — not mourning it.
The honest news about your old data
There is no working CareZone export, no import tool, and no third-party migration service that can recover a list from a dead account. Anyone selling you a “CareZone data recovery” step is selling something that does not exist. What you still have access to is better than the old export anyway:
- The pill bottles themselves, which carry the drug, strength, and directions.
- Your pharmacy’s app or printout — most chains will print a full 12-month medication history at the counter, free, if you ask.
- The after-visit summary from the last clinic appointment.
Rebuilding from bottles is the fastest of the three, because the label already contains everything a reminder schedule needs.
What a CareZone replacement actually has to do
CareZone bundled four separate jobs. Most apps marketed as replacements only do the first. Before you commit a parent to a new app, check all four:
1. Hold the list
Drug, strength, dose, times, prescriber, refill count. This is the part every app does, and the part that matters least on its own — a list nobody looks at does not change behaviour.
2. Fire the reminder at the person taking the pills
On the phone of the person who takes the medication, at the dose time, in a way that survives the phone being on silent or face-down on a kitchen table.
3. Tell someone when the dose was missed
This is the job CareZone never really did and the reason families kept calling each other every night. A reminder that only reaches the patient tells you nothing about whether they took it.
4. Be set up by the family member, not the patient
If setup requires an 82-year-old to type twelve drug names correctly on a phone keyboard, it does not get set up. Someone else has to be able to do it remotely and hand over a working phone.
How Pillybot compares
| Job | CareZone (before shutdown) | Pillybot |
|---|---|---|
| Build the medication list | Type each drug by hand, or scan a label | Photograph the prescription label or bottle; the drug, strength and schedule are read off it and shown for you to confirm |
| Reminders | Local phone reminders | Scheduled push notifications per dose, with snooze and a one-tap “I took it” |
| Caregiver visibility | Shared account with a shared password | Separate caregiver account linked by invitation, with its own console showing every patient’s doses |
| Missed-dose escalation | None | Caregivers are notified when a dose goes unconfirmed, so silence stops meaning “probably fine” |
| Older-adult interface | One interface for everyone | Optional Easy Mode: three screens, large type, high contrast — switched on by the caregiver, off by default |
| Doctor visits | Printable list | A one-page visit report: current medications, adherence, and which doses are actually being missed |
| Refills | Pharmacy-linked ordering | Refill countdown per medication (no pharmacy ordering — you still call it in) |
| Cost | Free, then gone | Free |
Two honest gaps, since you already got burned once: Pillybot does not order refills from your pharmacy, and it does not do the CareZone “family journal” feed. If those were the features you used most, this is not a like-for-like replacement.
Rebuilding the list in about five minutes
- Gather the bottles. Every current one, including inhalers, eye drops, and the vitamins your parent counts as medication. Put them on a table with the labels facing up.
- Create a caregiver account and add your parent as the person you care for. You do this on your own phone; they do not need to be present.
- Photograph each label. The drug name, strength, and directions are read off the label and turned into a draft schedule. Confirm or correct each one — always check the strength against the bottle before saving.
- Set the times to match real life, not the label. “Twice daily” should become the two times your parent will actually be awake and near their pills — usually breakfast and whatever counts as evening.
- Send the invitation to your parent’s phone, install it as an app from the browser menu, and turn on notifications on that device. This step is the one people skip; without it, reminders have nowhere to land.
- Turn on Easy Mode if the phone belongs to someone who finds normal app interfaces small or busy.
Keeping the list true after the first week
Medication lists rot faster than anything else in a care routine. Dosages change at every appointment, hospital discharges rewrite half the list, and the bottle in the cabinet is often the old strength. Three habits keep it honest:
- Update the app in the car park after every appointment, not later that week.
- After any hospital stay, treat the discharge list as the new source of truth and delete anything not on it — then confirm the deletions with the prescriber.
- Bring the one-page report to appointments. A clinician correcting a printed list in front of you is the cheapest audit you will ever get.
Rebuild the list once. Stop guessing after that.
Photograph the prescriptions, confirm what was read, and Pillybot handles the reminders — while you see, from your own phone, whether the doses were actually taken.
Free. No card. Works on the phone you already have.
Pillybot is a reminder and record-keeping tool, not a medical device, and nothing here is medical advice. Dose changes belong to the prescriber.