Medication Reminder: a custom integration for tracking pet & human medication doses

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Hi there! I want to thank you for your work—it’s great.

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Good news on Russian. The integration already ships German, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Italian, and follows your Home Assistant language automatically, and Russian is on the way in. Another community member (interkom) kindly put a Russian translation together a while back, and I am getting it into the next release now. Once it lands, Russian users, including the older folks you mention, will get the setup screens in Russian out of the box, with anything not yet translated falling back to English.

If you want it right now without waiting for the release, you can grab interkom’s ru.json straight from the translations thread (issue magikh0e/ha-medication-reminder#13: and drop it in yourself. Put the file at config/custom_components/medication_reminder/translations/ru.json and restart Home Assistant; it loads Russian immediately, and a later integration update will just keep it there.

If any wording reads awkwardly once you are using it, I would love the feedback; a small tweak to ru.json is an easy one-file contribution and there is a short guide in the repo.

Thanks again for the kind words and for asking.

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Thanks, I’ll look forward to the updates, and in the meantime, I’ll follow your advice.
Huge thanks once again!

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Hi fr0styh0e!
I’ve been using your creation for a few days now—thanks again for it.
I really like everything, but I was wondering if it’s possible to add a few things:
The notification currently only offers the option to “mark” the dose as taken, but there are times when you need to snooze the reminder, postpone the dose, or even skip a single dose entirely. It would be great to add options like “Remind me later” (e.g., in half an hour—with a configurable time) and “Skip” (clearing the reminder flag for the day without deducting the dose from your stock).
In my opinion, this improvement would make the app more versatile.

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Thanks, glad it is working well for you a few days in!

So currently it only offers “Mark given.” Under the hood it does re-remind on its own (it nags through the dose’s window and escalates once if the dose ends up missed), but there is no “not now” button and no way to skip a dose from the notification, so those are good gaps to close.

On your two ideas:

Remind me later / snooze: not there today. The nagging is automatic on a fixed interval, but there is no button to say “hang on, remind me again in 30 minutes.” A snooze action with a configurable delay is a nice addition to the reminder flow, and I am putting it on the list.

Skip: also a real gap, and good catch on the stock detail. Right now marking given is the only way to clear a reminder, and that both counts the dose as taken and deducts it from your supply. A proper “Skip for today” that clears the day’s reminder without recording the dose as taken and without touching stock needs a small change on the integration side (a skipped state the reminder can see), so it is a bit more than a blueprint tweak, but it is worth doing. On the list too.

Both would make the notification a lot more usable day to day, so thanks for the clear writeup. I am logging them as tracked requests so they do not get lost.

Issues being tracked: Add a Skip action: clear a dose for the day without marking it taken or deducting supply · Issue #33 · magikh0e/ha-medication-reminder · GitHub & Reminder notification: add a Snooze / Remind me later action (configurable delay) · Issue #32 · magikh0e/ha-medication-reminder · GitHub

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Shipped in v0.33.0.

Each tracked supply now has an optional Refills remaining field (in Track a medication supply / Edit a supply). Set it to the number of refills the pharmacy script allows; leave it at 0 to skip refill tracking.

  • Each press of the med’s refill button counts it down by one.
  • The supply exposes refills_remaining, refills_configured, and refills_out attributes.
  • When it reaches zero, binary_sensor.<patient>_supplies_low turns red with a refills_out list (and refills_out_count), so your existing low-supply automation can also prompt to schedule a doctor visit for a new prescription before you run out.

This is separate from the pill-count on hand, so a low reorder flag and an out-of-refills flag can each fire on their own. Existing supplies are unaffected; the field defaults to 0.

Thanks for the request.

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Skip a dose: done, in v0.37.0. Update in HACS and restart and you get a proper Skip, separate from marking a dose taken:

  • A new Skip today button right on the reminder (and the missed-dose alert). Tap it and that dose is cleared for the day.
  • It does NOT count the dose as taken and does NOT deduct anything from your stock, exactly as you described.
  • The reminders and the missed-dose nagging stop for that dose, and the red “needs attention” panel treats it as handled rather than overdue, so the dashboard stays green.
  • It resets on its own at your daily reset time. Change your mind? Just mark the dose given and the skip is cancelled.
  • It shows in the logbook as skipped, so your history stays accurate.

There is also a medication_reminder.skip_today service if you want to trigger it from an automation or a dashboard button. One setup note: the Skip button lives in the notification, so re-import the two reminder blueprints (reminders + “mark given / skip from notification”) to pick it up, or re-paste the companion automations if you use those. The service itself works without re-importing.

Remind me later / snooze: good idea, and it is tracked. This one is a little different under the hood. “Skip” needed real support inside the integration (a new dose state), which is why it came first. A snooze is more of a reminder-timing change: a “Remind me later” button that quiets the dose for a configurable delay, say 30 minutes, then pings again if it still has not been given or skipped. I have it noted as a separate item and it is a natural next step now that Skip is in. I will not promise a date, but it is firmly on the radar.

One question to steer it: would a single fixed snooze (one button, your chosen minutes) be enough, or would you want a couple of options on the notification, for example “15 min” and “1 hour”? That shapes how I build it.

Thanks again for pushing on this, both suggestions make it more usable. Give Skip a try and let me know how it feels.

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there is something wrong with those yaml files on github…
always getting error on this while ill want to update the yaml…
example earlydose.yaml
line 49 >>>default_notify: !input fallback_notify

error >>
Fout bij het parsen van YAML: unknown scalar tag ! (regel: 49, kolom: 19)

any clues???

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Hi Tadies.

The !input you see on line 49 is a special Home Assistant blueprint tag, and it only works when the file is imported as a blueprint, not when you paste the YAML into an automation, automations.yaml, configuration.yaml, or a plain YAML editor. Any of those will choke on !input with exactly that “unknown scalar tag !” error, because only the blueprint importer knows how to resolve it.

So the early_dose.yaml, medication_reminders.yaml, and mark_given.yaml files are blueprints, and you add/update them like this:

  1. Settings → Automations & Scenes → Blueprints → Import Blueprint.
  2. Paste the raw GitHub URL of the blueprint (the link to the file), not the file’s contents. For example: https://github.com/magikh0e/ha-medication_reminder/blob/main/blueprints/automation/medication_reminder/early_dose.yaml
  3. To update later, open the blueprint, use its three-dot menu, and choose Re-import. Automations you created from it keep their settings and pick up the change.

If what you actually want is to paste YAML straight into your automations.yaml (no blueprints), then use the companion-automations.yaml file instead, not the blueprint files. That one is written as plain automations with no !input, so it pastes in cleanly and does the same job (reminders, missed-dose, early-dose, un-mark, low-supply). Pick one approach or the other, not both, so you don’t get duplicate reminders.

Were you importing via the Blueprint URL, or pasting the file contents somewhere?

Hope this helps! :call_me_hand:

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Dang that explains it
Had to read up many!!
So great to see this
Is still a growing helpfull thing
For us all who uses it

Rock on!

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