The Beauty Spoon was created because I needed it. I bought an expensive serum and was determined to use every ounce of remaining product, even though the pump had stopped dispensing the serum. When I was nearing the end of the product, I noticed that I couldn’t retrieve the remaining liquid due to the design of the product bottle. This was not the first time that I experienced this problem. I tried different ways to remove the liquid with no luck. In that moment of frustration, the Beauty Spoon was born! The name and slogan “If you can’t get to, Beauty Spoon it!” followed shortly after.

When I worked for VA Palo Alto Healthcare System, I developed a passion for helping patients manage their medications on a day-to-day basis….from helping them to organize their pills, moving through their life with their medications rather than becoming burdened by them, remembering to take them on time, and assisting them in ways to easily communicate to other healthcare providers what they are taking at home.  There was one patient in particular who started me on the path of thinking that their needs to be a device on the market that focuses on ALL of the major difficulties patients face with their medications.  She was a World War II nurse who lived alone in California and all of her relatives were on the East Coast.  Her physician referred her to me because he could not get a good sense of what medications she was taking at home, and he knew that she was seeing other healthcare providers at Kaiser.  Her family members on the East Coast were contemplating of whether they should put her into an assisted living home.  She was instructed to bring all of her medications from home to the visit.  It was evident after several visits that she was very good at remembering to take her medications and she just followed how to take them based on what was written on the prescription labels.  Unfortunately, she basically became a shut-in because she was always waiting at home for the next dose due to the fact that she could not take her 15 individual pill bottles with her on all her errands.  Also, she was unable to remember all the “foreign sounding” brand and generic drug names and rather just knew her pills by shapes and colors…..this prompted her physicians to think she was continually confused!  What I did was I set her up with a pillbox and taught her how to fill it every week, which she did with great accuracy.  The pillbox also allowed her to carry her daily medications with her on errands and daily activities, thus getting her out of the house.  Lastly, I took a sheet of paper and taped sample pills in the margin.  Next to the pills, I wrote the corresponding brand and generic drug names, the dose, how many times she took it per day, and the indication.  I told her to take the sheet of paper to every medical visit she went to so that every healthcare provider was well aware of what was happening at home on the medication front.  Not long after that, she no longer needed my services as she was fully capable of using these tools to improve her medication adherence, and her kids on the East Coast were truly appreciative.  Similar types of visits with other patients prompted me to develop the idea of a medication management system that incorporates all of these tools into one device.  However, it had to be easy to use, portable, compatible with the fast-paced lifestyle of the 21st century, and directed towards all age groups rather than just the elderly.