Haifa, Israel-based MediSafe added a birth control pill tracking feature to its medication adherence app this week.

MediSafe, which was in Microsoft's Tel Aviv accelerator, offers a cloud-based app system for medication adherence. Patients using MediSafe get a reminder to take their meds on their Android or iPhone app, and are then prompted to record doses when they take them. If they don’t indicate that they’ve taken their meds, a series of friends and family members is informed and can then take action.

"Female users have been using MediSafe for birth control pills for some time now, but it was a bit awkward," MediSafe CEO Omri “Bob” Shor told MobiHealthNews. "You know a continuous medication is something that you take every day but it wasn't really perfected for contraceptives, for birth control pills."

While some birth control pills are taken every day, others are taken at different intervals, for example different pills are taken for 21 days with seven days off or 24 days with three days off.

MediSafe found that before the company offered this feature, when women were entering birth control reminders through the original MediSafe reminder system, they increased their birth control adherence by 23 percent. Additionally, women who used MediSafe for taking birth control reported that they were adherent 94 percent of the time.

Shor adds that the app now has 800,000 users and 55 percent of those users are female.

Over 300 women have switched to the new contraceptive tracking feature since it launched a week ago. Women can also use the new feature to assign friends or significant others the responsibility of reminding them if they forget to take their birth control pills, which 30 percent of the women have done.

"After many requests both from the ladies out there and from pharmaceutical companies, we have decided to invest a couple of weeks and make sure that from now on contraceptives are easy to enter into MediSafe to fit their needs," Shor said.

Since MediSafe raised $1 million last year, the company has focused on growing its user base and also building partnerships with pharmaceutical companies, healthcare providers, and pharmaceutical chains. Shor explained that one of MediSafe's pharmaceutical partners suggested the birth control feature too. He added that selling deidentified data to healthcare providers and pharma companies will eventually be a source of revenue for MediSafe.