Track medication supply and know when to refill

HealthLab keeps a running count of a medication’s supply inside its course: you record how many units came in the pack, the app already knows the daily dose from the course schedule, and it uses those two numbers to tell you in advance when to buy the next pack. This lives in “Medications & courses,” not the medicine cabinet — the cabinet warns about expiry dates, the course tracks supply and refills. All of it is free, with no subscription required.

What to do and where

Step 1. Record how many units are in the pack

Open the medication’s course under “Medications & courses” and enter how many tablets, capsules, or other units came in the pack you just opened. This is a one-time action per new pack: as soon as the count is entered, the app starts counting down from that number. When one pack runs out and a new one starts, the count gets entered again — the app doesn’t guess that a new pack has begun until you tell it.

Step 2. Set the daily dose via the course schedule

Supply is not tracked as a standalone number — it is tracked against the course schedule: how many times a day and how many units per dose. If the course is already set up with a schedule — see medication course, schedule and reminders for all the setup steps — the daily dose is already known to the app, and there is nothing extra to enter.

Step 3. See how many days the pack will last

With the unit count in the pack and the daily dose from the schedule, the app projects ahead how many days the current supply will cover. That number updates with every confirmed dose: the more doses you’ve confirmed, the more accurately it reflects what’s left today, not just what was true the day you opened the pack.

This projection is a moving number, not a one-time calculation: if a few doses get missed, the days-remaining figure adjusts to the actual pace of use rather than staying pinned to the original 30-day or 60-day plan.

Step 4. Get a refill notification

When the supply is down to a few days’ worth, the app sends a notification that it’s time to think about the next pack. The notification is tied to that specific course — the one with both a unit count and a schedule set — not to the medicine cabinet as a whole.

Step 5. Use the supply info at the pharmacy

Before a pharmacy run, open the course card — it shows the current supply and which medication it’s for. That’s a quick thing to check against a prescription or the previous pack, especially when buying for someone else in the family. HealthLab does not order medication, reserve a pack at any pharmacy, or compare prices between pharmacies — the supply count only tells you when it’s time to go buy more, nothing beyond that.

Example: a 60-tablet pack, 2 a day, a pharmacy 40 minutes away

A medication is taken twice a day out of a 60-tablet pack — on paper, that’s exactly 30 days of supply. But the nearest pharmacy that carries it is a 40-minute drive away, and running out there on the last possible day doesn’t leave much room for error if that exact pack isn’t in stock, or there simply isn’t time that day. Aim for “runs out on day 30” and plan the pharmacy trip for day 30 itself, and a day or two without the medication is a real possibility.

The refill notification in HealthLab is timed to build in a buffer for exactly this kind of situation: it arrives ahead of the actual run-out date, not on the day the tablets are gone. For the 60-tablet pack in this example, that means the trip can happen on day 25 instead of day 30 — a few days of slack for the drive, a line at the counter, or the pack not being on the shelf on the first try.

The gap between “runs out on day 30” and “time to buy on day 25” looks small on paper, but it’s exactly what decides whether an evening dose gets skipped the night before a pharmacy trip, or the medication is simply there when the next dose is due. For a medication taken every day without a break, that buffer matters more than it does for one where missing a single dose isn’t as consequential — which is why the notification is timed against the actual pace a specific course is being used at, rather than the same fixed number of days for every medication.

Edge cases

• Split tablets. If the schedule calls for half a tablet per dose, record the pack count in the same unit you use for dosing (halves, for instance) — that keeps the projection matched to the actual rate the pack is being used at.
• As-needed medication, not on a fixed schedule. A dose taken as needed — a painkiller for a symptom, say — is logged in the Journal as its own event, not as part of a scheduled course. The course’s supply projection and refill timing depend on a regular schedule, so for irregular, as-needed use it’s an approximate guide at best, not a precise forecast.
• Several packs of the same medicine at once. If there’s already an unopened backup pack in the cabinet while the current one is still running, factor that in when planning a purchase — the refill notification is about the course and the current supply count you entered, not an automatic total of every pack physically sitting in the house.

None of these cases stop the course or its schedule from working — they only affect how precise the supply projection is in that particular situation. If the projection ever looks off, the simplest check is to count the actual tablets in the pack every few weeks and compare that against what the app shows — with doses confirmed regularly, the gap is usually small.

Free or Pro

Recording a pack’s unit count, projecting how many days it will last, and getting a refill notification are all Free, with no limit and no subscription. That’s the same line drawn around the rest of a course’s basic functions — schedule, dose reminders, PIN protection for dose confirmation — all free, with no exception carved out for supply tracking.

It’s worth telling this apart from a similarly named cabinet feature: the medicine cabinet has its own refill list, but it’s built from expiration dates, not from how many tablets are left. Both deal with “time to restock,” but they count different things — the course counts tablets, the cabinet counts days until something expires.

For the same medication, both can run at once without contradicting each other: the course might say the tablets run out in a week, while the cabinet separately flags that the pack itself is nearing its expiration date before it even gets finished. These are two independent signals about the same pack, and neither one replaces the other.

Frequently asked questions

HealthLab: from a schedule to the next pack

Supply tracking builds on a course that’s already set up — the name, dose, and schedule determine how fast a pack gets used. If a course doesn’t exist yet, start with medication course, schedule and reminders, which covers every setup step, including this same link between a course and its supply.

For medications taken for months at a time — a long iron course for low ferritin, for example — supply tracking pays off the most, since buying the next pack becomes a recurring task rather than a one-off. For the marker itself and when such courses come up, see ferritin levels and anaemia blood tests.

Set up a course, its schedule, and supply tracking under Medications & courses — no account, no registration, your data stays on your device.